------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bootstrapping Maven ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Set the environment variable M2_HOME pointing to the dir where you want Maven2 installed... with two key restrictions. 1) presently, the directory {M2_HOME}/bin must be in your path: set PATH=%PATH%;%M2_HOME%\bin or export PATH=$PATH:$M2_HOME/bin 2) The last part of the M2_HOME path MUST be of the form maven-$version, eg: /usr/local/maven-2.1-SNAPSHOT You can set the parameters passed to the Java VM when running Maven2 bootstrap, setting the environment variable MAVEN_OPTS, e.g. to run in offline mode, set MAVEN_OPTS=-o Then run bootstrap.bat (in Windows) or bootstrap.sh (in Unix) NOTE: You must run these instructions from this directory! If you are behind a firewall, you will need to let the bootstrap process know. To do this, create a file at ~/.m2/settings.xml and paste in the XML below, substituting your settings for those provided. You can safely skip the username, password and nonProxyHost elements if they are not relevant to you. true http proxy.somewhere.com 8080 proxyuser somepassword www.google.com|*.somewhere.com