Missing maven .m2 folder

On a Windows machine, the .m2 folder is expected to be located under ${user.home}. On Windows 7 and Vista this resolves to <root>\Users\<username> and on XP it is <root>\Documents and Settings\<username>\.m2. So you'd normally see it under c:\Users\Jonathan\.m2.

If you want to create a folder with a . prefix on Windows, you can simply do this on the command line.

• Go to Start->Run
• Type cmd and press Enter
• At the command prompt type md c:\Users\Jonathan\.m2 (or equivalent for your ${user.home} value).

Note that you don't actually need the .m2 location unless you want to create a distinct user settings file, which is optional (see the Settings reference for more details).

If you don't need a separate user settings file and don't really want the local repository under your user home you can simply set the location of your repository to a different folder by modifying the global settings file (located in \conf\settings.xml).

The following snippet would set the local repository to c:\Maven\repository for example:

<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>c:\Maven\repository</localRepository>
  ...

When you first install maven, .m2 folder will not be present in C:\Users\ {user} path. To generate the folder you have to run any maven command e.g. mvn clean, mvn install etc. so that it searches for settings.xml in .m2 folder and when not found creates one.

So long story cur short, open cmd -> mvn install

It will show could not find any projects(Don't worry maven is working fine :P) now check your user folder.

P.S. If still not able to view .m2 folder try unhiding hidden items.

Use mvn -X or mvn --debug to find out from which different locations Maven reads settings.xml. This switch activates debug logging. Just check the first lines of mvn --debug | findstr /i /c:using /c:reading.

Right, Maven uses the Java system property user.home as location for the .m2 folder.

But user.home does not always resolve to %USERPROFILE%\.m2. If you have moved the location of your Desktop folder to another place, user.home might resolve to the parent directory of this new Desktop folder. This happens when using Windows Vista or a more recent Windows together with Java 7 or any older Java version.

The blog post Java’s “user.home” is Wrong on Windows describes it very well and gives links to the official bug reports. The bug is marked as resolved in Java 8. The comment of the blog's visitor Lars proposes a nice workaround.