Maven: “Error reading archetype catalog”, NOT behind a Proxy

Question

Command:

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false -DgroupId=org.apache.solr -DartifactId=es-my-proj


        

Answer 1

It seems like Apache central repository has fixed the issue. So without making any change, the problem is fixed now. Please try once again and let us know in case of any issue.

Answer 2

The Apache Maven team faced the same issue with one of their integration-tests, see the related message-thread. So it seems that during the last week of August the policy has changed and it is not possible to get these xml files without a User-Agent in the request. There's no option in the Maven Settings to set this value, neither have I found another way to set it.

I can confirm that Maven-3.0.4 does work, but this version has a security issue. According to other posts other older versions of Maven seem to work as well.

Unless Maven Central changes its policy, this is something which needs to be fixed in the next Maven release.

Answer 3

I got the same error yesterday. I didn't finish to find the solution yet but I have a idea why we have this errror.

After hours of digging in the maven-archetype-plugin, I didn't notice something strange...

So i decide to run the same command again with a tcpflow running to capture the sended request. Here is the result :

192.168.000.010.59775-185.031.016.185.00080: GET /maven2/archetype-catalog.xml HTTP/1.1
Cache-control: no-cache
Cache-store: no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Host: repo1.maven.org
Connection: Keep-Alive


185.031.016.185.00080-192.168.000.010.59775: HTTP/1.1 403 Denied Access
Server: Varnish
Retry-After: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 401
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 01:53:29 GMT
Via: 1.1 varnish
Age: 0
Connection: close
X-Served-By: cache-am70-AMS
X-Cache: MISS
X-Cache-Hits: 0

So, a Guru Meditation error. I like Varnish !! After that, I notice using netcat that, if you add a User-Agent (anything) in the request, everything works fine !!

[07:49][patouche@patouche-desktop:~ :) ] $ nc repo1.maven.org 80
GET /maven2/archetype-catalog.xml HTTP/1.1
Cache-control: no-cache
Cache-store: no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Host: repo1.maven.org
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: I have a dream...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.2.1
Content-Type: text/xml
Last-Modified: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 11:06:25 GMT
Via: 1.1 varnish
Content-Length: 1663366
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 05:50:09 GMT
Via: 1.1 varnish
Age: 81998
Connection: keep-alive
X-Served-By: cache-c32-CHI, cache-l22-LON
X-Cache: HIT, HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 5, 1

So, if you add a User-Agent in the request, everything will work. I thinks with the settings.xml but I don't know how for now.