What is Archiva and how do I install it?
Author: Deron Eriksson
Description: This tutorial describes Archiva and how to install it.
Tutorial created using: Windows Vista || JDK 1.6.0_04

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On its website ( http://maven.apache.org/archiva/ ), ArchivaS is referred to as a "Build Artifact Repository Manager". It is basically a web application that provides useful functionality in conjunction with mavenSW repositories. One of the great things that it can do it serve as an on-demand mirror of the maven central repository. Rather than making requests for artifacts from the maven central repository, you ask the Archiva 'repository' for the central repository artifact. Archiva will then retrieve the artifact and accompanying metadata files from the maven central repository and store these files in its repository, and it will return the requested artifact to the user. If another developer makes a request of Archiva for the same artifact, Archiva will return the artifact to the user. Archiva doesn't need to make a request to the central repository since it already has the resource. Thus, it can provide "on-demand" mirroring capabilities of the maven central repository. It's a great way to minimize long-distance network communication and replace it with an in-house repository mirror server that only mirrors the artifacts that your team is using.

Archiva provides other cool features such as artifact searching and repository browsing capabilities. The Archiva project information pages provide useful information such as a project's "POM Dependency Snippet".

It can be downloaded at http://maven.apache.org/archiva/download.html. It comes in both a standalone version and a warW file version. The standalone version uses a Jetty server. I downloaded the standalone zip file. I unzipped it to C:\dev\apache-archiva-1.0.1.

Archiva unzipped

I modified the C:\dev\apache-archiva-1.0.1\conf\plexus.xml configuration file to change the jetty port from 8080 to 8081, since I use 8080 for other things (Tomcat).


Archiva can be run both as a regular application or installed as a service. I chose to run it as a regular application. To do this, there is a run.bat file present in C:\dev\apache-archiva-1.0.1\bin\windows-x86-32.


I opened a command prompt window and ran the run.bat file:

Executing run.bat file at command prompt

Archiva started up successfully.

Archiva started

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