My Maven installation (Windows 7 64-bit) has a .cache
directory that is almost 3.5GB! It contains only a m2e
directory. (I'm running Eclipse 4.3M7 with m2e.) Surely all the things inside aren't needed at present, and moreover I don't even know what this stuff is! I could find no Maven documentation of a .cache
directory online.
So what are the .m2/repository/.cache
and .m2/repository/.cache/m2e
directories? Why do they have so much stuff from years ago? How do I dispose of all the stuff that's not needed anymore?
We can do a setting in the eclipse ide to disable .cache folder to increase.
Window->Preferences->Maven->Download repository index updates on startup
Disable this option and you will get rid of .cache problem!
In contrast to the other answers, make sure to keep
.m2/*.xml
(your settings) and.m2/repository
(not strictly necessary to keep, but Maven will have to download half the Internet again).Now, as for that
.cache
folder: if you open Eclipse, M2Eclipse will sometimes run a job akin to "Downloading repository indexes". These indexes allow you to quickly find an artifact using M2E's "Add dependency" wizard if you only know (part of) its artifact id. It needs to put the downloaded index files somewhere, and according to http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/m2e-users/msg02486.html the.cache
folder is where they go:The Lucene stuff they're talking about are extra optimized search databases, this makes it faster for M2E to search a given artifact if you only enter a partial artifact id or group id.
If I read http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/m2e-users/msg01708.html correctly then it should be safe to remove them:
Keep in mind though that M2E will notice the missing folder the next time you open Eclipse, so be prepared to wait while it downloads all repository indexes again!
The m2e directory is the Eclipse Maven plugin's cache, not Maven's.
The .m2 directory is your maven repository cache. Whenever maven downloads something for you, it will cache it here. Usually it's safe to just delete the directory. Maven will recreate it for you. However, if you have dependencies that only exist in your repo cache, you'll have to reinstall them.