I installed Maven on my Fedora 12 box and fired the command listed at How_do_I_make_my_first_Maven_project :
$ mvn archetype:create \
-DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes \
-DgroupId=com.mycompany.app \
-DartifactId=my-app
/usr/lib/jvm/java
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'archetype'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] The plugin 'org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-archetype-plugin' does not exist or no valid version could be found
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] For more information, run Maven with the -e switch
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: < 1 second
[INFO] Finished at: Thu May 20 13:15:56 GMT+05:30 2010
[INFO] Final Memory: 13M/26M
[INFO] -----------------------
I tried to debug it further by adding -X and -e options to the commandline. It didn’t work! After a lot of googling around I found that the default repository site ( http://www.ibiblio.org/ ) is not responding. So I added a mirror url to my local maven repository:
$ cat ~/.m2/settings.xml
<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0
http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
<localRepository/>
<interactiveMode/>
<usePluginRegistry/>
<offline/>
<pluginGroups/>
<servers/>
<mirrors>
<mirror>
<id>maven2repo</id>
<name>MavenRepo</name>
<url>http://repo2.maven.org/maven2/</url>
<mirrorOf>central</mirrorOf>
</mirror>
</mirrors>
<proxies/>
<profiles/>
<activeProfiles/>
</settings>
This time I added additional option -U to the command line ( as per suggestion from irc://irc.codehaus.org/maven ):
mvn -U -X -e archetype:create\
-DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes\
-DgroupId=com.mycompany.app\
-DartifactId=my-app
Thats it. It worked perfectly.