How to specify an alternate location for the .m2 folder or settings.xml permanently?

You need to add this line into your settings.xml (or uncomment if it's already there).

<localRepository>C:\Users\me\.m2\repo</localRepository>

Also it's possible to run your commands with mvn clean install -gs C:\Users\me\.m2\settings.xml - this parameter will force maven to use different settings.xml then the default one (which is in $HOME/.m2/settings.xml)

It's funny how other answers ignore the fact that you can't write to that file...

There are a few workarounds that come to my mind which could help use an arbitrary C:\redirected\settings.xml and use the mvn command as usual happily ever after.

mvn alias

In a Unix shell (or on Cygwin) you can create

alias mvn='mvn --global-settings "C:\redirected\settings.xml"'

so when you're calling mvn blah blah from anywhere the config is "automatically" picked up.
See How to create alias in cmd? if you want this, but don't have a Unix shell.

mvn wrapper

Configure your environment so that mvn is resolved to a wrapper script when typed in the command line:

• Remove your MVN_HOME/bin or M2_HOME/bin from your PATH so mvn is not resolved any more.
• Add a folder to PATH (or use an existing one)

• In that folder create an mvn.bat file with contents:

  call C:\your\path\to\maven\bin\mvn.bat --global-settings "C:\redirected\settings.xml" %*
  

Note: if you want some projects to behave differently you can just create mvn.bat in the same folder as pom.xml so when you run plain mvn it resolves to the local one.

Use where mvn at any time to check how it is resolved, the first one will be run when you type mvn.

mvn.bat hack

If you have write access to C:\your\path\to\maven\bin\mvn.bat, edit the file and add set MAVEN_CMD_LINE_ARG to the :runm2 part:

@REM Start MAVEN2
:runm2
set MAVEN_CMD_LINE_ARGS=--global-settings "C:\redirected\settings.xml" %MAVEN_CMD_LINE_ARGS%
set CLASSWORLDS_LAUNCHER=...

mvn.sh hack

For completeness, you can change the C:\your\path\to\maven\bin\mvn shell script too by changing the exec "$JAVACMD" command's

${CLASSWORLDS_LAUNCHER} "$@"

part to

${CLASSWORLDS_LAUNCHER} --global-settings "C:\redirected\settings.xml" "$@"

Suggestion/Rant

As a person in IT it's funny that you don't have access to your own home folder, for me this constitutes as incompetence from the company you're working for: this is equivalent of hiring someone to do software development, but not providing even the possibility to use anything other than notepad.exe or Microsoft Word to edit the source files. I'd suggest to contact your help desk or administrator and request write access at least to that particular file so that you can change the path of the local repository.

Disclaimer: None of these are tested for this particular use case, but I successfully used all of them previously for various other software.

Nobody suggested this, but you can use -Dmaven.repo.local command line argument to change where the repository is at. In addition, according to settings.xml documentation, you can set -Dmaven.home where it looks for the settings.xml file.

See: Settings.xml documentation

Below is the configuration in Maven software by default in MAVEN_HOME\conf\settings.xml.

<settings>
  <!-- localRepository
   | The path to the local repository maven will use to store artifacts.
   |
   | Default: ~/.m2/repository
  <localRepository>/path/to/local/repo</localRepository>
  -->

Add the below line under this configuration, will fulfill the requirement.

<localRepository>custom_path</localRepository>

Ex: <localRepository>D:/MYNAME/settings/.m2/repository</localRepository>