What if maven central goes down for good?

Question

At my work we are working on different projects and most of them are maven projects now. Sometimes, I think that what happens if all of sudden the Maven Central repository goes down for good.

Now, there are different scenarios in which it can go down including natural disaster,fire event etc.

As far as I know the companies in the United Kingdom have a certificate of Business Continuity Management that means they have plans of running the business in case of any disaster.

I've tried searching online but couldn't find this information on Maven website.

Do they have this kinda certificate ? Do the guarantee that they will be running their server forever?

Any answer would be appreciated.

Answer 1

As noted in comments there are mirrors but if this is an operational concern for you or your business, the solution is simple; host your own repository.

There are at least two freely available tool for doing this. I prefer Artifactory and there is also Nexus.

You set up all internal maven clients to connect to it instead of repositories elsewhere. Your repository then goes out to Maven central et. al and caches those artifacts.

This way you'll always have access to all the artifacts that you've been using. If Maven central goes away, you won't be left with broken builds.

Answer 2

If you are using Maven for anything serious you should set up your own in-office mirror. Either Artifactory or Nexus are good.

If central repository disappears you builds would still run, but you won't be getting any automatic updates to the packages. Of course then you could either volunteer somebody from your group or higher a new person to keep things going forward. In the short term you wouldn't have a disaster and will be able to do your builds.