2020-06-30

Stop Netbeans downloading whole 1GB maven index

Netbeans for Java programming with Maven likes to download the Maven index that's over 1 GB in size.

There's basically three ways to stop that huge download for 3 different situations:

(1) Temporarily don't want auto updates

If you already downloaded the index, the updates are smaller but still sizable.  One way to to stop it re-downloading the updates is to go to:

Tools > Options > Java > Maven > Index > Index update frequency > set to never.

Then click "Index Now" in that window only whenever you want an update.

(2) Just don't want Maven at all

If you don't have the index downloaded yet (e.g. a new install) and basically never want to use Maven, then in that same window, you could instead check off:

Completely disable indexing

As it warns you, lots of features will be disabled, but if you're not using Maven, who cares?

(3) Want Maven index without the download

This is amazing, there's this plugin you should get and it'll solve this problem: Maven Remote Search plugin.

It's old and it says it's for Netbeans 8.2 (the super old Oracle version), but I tried it out and it works for the new Apache Netbeans 11 and 12!

It lets you search the Maven index online rather than downloading the whole index to your local disk (which is crazy).

The github repo for the plugin is active recently with a historical build, so hopefully it'll get its version bumped and put on the Apache Netbeans plugins web page (which I don't think exists yet...).


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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice. Will save 1GB

Unknown said...

I have eclipse using maven and it only downloads dependies which i mention in pom.xml

but in case of netbeans 1.5GB data used and when i relised netbeans taking much data i close it after i reopen it and again it start eating

i want it must downlaod dependencie which i mention not whole world dependency

pakkaem said...

Thank you, save my internet data