Maven: Failed to read artifact descriptor

Question

I am hoping someone can help me with a problem I am struggling with.

When I try to build my project from the terminal I get this error:

Failed to read artifact descriptor for com.morrislgn.merchandising.common:test-data-utils:jar:0.3b-SNAPSHOT: Could not find artifact com.morrislgn.merchandising:merchandising:pom:0.3b-SNAPSHOT

The common.test-data-utils jar is created by a separate project and shared between this and another project (the other project doesn't build either, but that is down to another problem).

I am able to build com.morrislgn.merchandising.common:test-data-utils without issue, I can see the entry it makes in the .m2 local repository on my machine. I have reindexed my repository in Eclipse also.

The POM for my project has this entry:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.morrislgn.merchandising.common</groupId>
    <artifactId>test-data-utils</artifactId>
    <version>0.3b-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

Which appears to be correct to me - the POM doesn't report any errors either when it is viewed in Eclipse.

Can some one tell me what I am missing here or doing wrong?

score 198 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 26 '19 at 12:41

198

You can always try mvn -U clean install

-U forces a check for updated releases and snapshots on remote repositories.

edited Feb 26 '19 at 12:41

Majid

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answered Nov 12 '12 at 17:10

Gal Bracha

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@MrPhi: If you have the m2e plugin, then you can use Maven -> "Update Project...". The next dialog will have an option to force updates of snapshots and releases. – Aaron Digulla Mar 13 '14 at 14:04
1

@AaronDigulla It's that dialog box which is causing the error for me. – Jeroen Apr 13 '14 at 21:15
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To make this works you should run command being inside of root dir of your project – Daria Mar 14 '16 at 17:44
I had a similar issue as well. This really helps, and in addition, if you are using private mvn repo, make sure to add that to your `~/.m2/setting.xml` mirror section first, and then after running `mvn -U clean install`, make sure to `Reimport` (right click the project, then under the bottom `Maven` section there is a `Reimport` button). – JACK ZHANG Apr 03 '18 at 00:45
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@TomaszWaszczyk : Yes there is. 1. Windows-show view->Terminal. 2. Add local terminal 3. cd PomFilePath 4. Run the command – Vishnu Dahatonde Apr 22 '19 at 04:59

bzuillsmith · Answer 2 · 2016-05-03T00:43:28.807

159

This problem can occur if you have some child projects that refer to a parent pom and you have not installed from the parent pom directory (run mvn install from the parent directory). One of the child projects may depend on a sibling project and when it goes to read the pom of the sibling, it will fail with the error mentioned in the question unless you have installed from the parent pom directory at least once.

I just ran into this problem when moving a project to a new computer. I was in the habit of running commands from the child project and didn't run install on the parent.

edited May 03 '16 at 00:43

answered Oct 22 '13 at 18:14

bzuillsmith

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In addition, when running `mvn install` on parent you can also add `-N` for non-recursive operation. This will cause maven to skip all the modules (including one that fails) and just do `install` goal for the parent. – Jacek Prucia Oct 07 '15 at 16:02
@JacekPrucia good to know that a pom artifact also needs to be installed (if your parent is a pom) – Adrian Dec 16 '16 at 00:39
@bzuillsmith why would you need to run `mvn install` in the parent pom. Wouldn't this only be used so the sibling dependency can be downloaded? If you happen to have went to the sibling directory & ran `mvn install` from there so that the jar is in your local repository, doesn't this accomplish the same exact thing? – user2158382 Nov 07 '17 at 16:45
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It's been a few years since I've used maven, but--Yes, I believe you can install the sibling dependencies one by one. Installing from the parent just tends to be less work (fewer commands to type and run). There may be cases in large projects where you don't want all child projects installed in which case you would need to run them individually. – bzuillsmith Nov 13 '17 at 04:59
My project like ch-multip-spring\simple-parent\simple-model\pom.xml, I do mvn clean install from root ch-multip-spring folder(not from simple-parent as well), it solved my the issue similar to the post title. – IcyBrk Jan 13 '18 at 15:02
@bzuillsmith Wow! This answer did save me. Doing `mvn install` at least once on the parent pom is the key! My spring-boot subproject kept failing to resolve the dependency on a sibling subproject, even if I did `mvn install` **on that sibling**! But once I did `mvn -N install` on the parent, the spring-boot subproject finally started to work. So, again, `mvn -N install` on the parent is the key. (although I don't know why yet) – Zhou May 04 '20 at 12:07
Man, you a life saver! Been wasting days trying to figure out why it failed on my project... – Charles Zhao Jun 12 '20 at 10:49

score 123 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 24 '17 at 20:00

123

Had the same issue with IntelliJ IDEA and following worked.

Go to File
Select Settings
Select Build, Execution, Deployments
Select Build Tools from drop down
Select Maven from drop down
Tick the Always update snapshots check box

edited Oct 24 '17 at 20:00

Basil Bourque

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answered Aug 15 '17 at 16:35

prime

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This worked for me, but I don't understand why - I was attempting to build from the command line. Was there something cached from IntelliJ? – goodOldFashioned Jan 25 '18 at 01:07
Worked for me too! Can't believe how frustrating this was. Thanks! – Ben Arena May 10 '18 at 20:52
@ goodOldFashioned: This "always update" overwrote the ....lastUpdated file from the local repository. -U does the same from the commandline. So intellij fixed your local repo, and then the commandline worked again. – Frischling Sep 05 '18 at 07:32
Simple and effective – Ojonugwa Jude Ochalifu Jan 17 '19 at 14:53
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after browsing the whole internet, finally this worked for me – khawarizmi Feb 11 '19 at 14:12

score 47 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 15 '17 at 15:10

If you are using Eclipse, Right Click on your Project -> Maven -> Update Project. It will open Update Maven Project dialog box.

In that dialog box, check Force Update of Snapshots/Releases checkbox & click OK. (Please refer image below)

This worked for me !

score 38 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 11 '14 at 16:47

38

If you're using eclipse, right click on project -> properties -> Maven and make sure that the "Resolve dependencies from workspace projects" is not clicked.

Hope this helps.

answered Nov 11 '14 at 16:47

tharindu_DG

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It works for me. But I dont understand why? Any explanation behind this? – Anand Nov 13 '17 at 07:26
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this did not work for me, initially 12 decencies were missing, after doing this it is 74 now – user2044822 Aug 22 '18 at 14:17

score 29 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 14 '12 at 16:13

29

I know I'm pretty late to the conversation, but I had this problem too. I think the issue was my company's firewall. My solution was to unplug from the network, connect to our open wireless and then force an update via Eclipse. This resolved everything.

answered Nov 14 '12 at 16:13

rrs

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You need to have put in [proxy info into your .m2/settings.xml](https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-proxies.html) – inanutshellus Jan 05 '16 at 17:13
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Thanks guys! It worked for me and saved a lot of time. – saidfagan Jan 18 '18 at 08:30

score 15 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 16 '12 at 14:43

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I had the same issue with eclipse where the maven build command line worked just fine BUT try this

go into .m2/repository and wipe the directory associated
run update maven dependencies in eclipse

The error goes away....why my mvn command line worked with those directories and eclipse .m2eclipse could not, I have no idea and it kinda sucks. My project is now working in eclipse again.

answered Feb 16 '12 at 14:43

Dean Hiller

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on a side note, we switched to gradle....so much happier than ant and maven....extremely nice setup. – Dean Hiller May 08 '13 at 19:57
Not even sure it's anything Eclipse-related. I had the same issue with IntelliJ and deleting the problematic packages and re-running `mvn clean install` worked – Jay Jul 19 '17 at 23:41

score 12 · Answer 8 · answered Feb 28 '18 at 20:15

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I had same problem using IntelliJ. I solved with right click on pom.xml > Maven > Reimport

answered Feb 28 '18 at 20:15

rlopezo

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Yeah, like life is just that simple. Anyways, @prime answer worked for me. – Imam Bux Dec 20 '18 at 10:59

score 10 · Answer 9 · answered Mar 19 '12 at 17:08

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I solved this issue by deleting in the repository folders where this error was shown everything except the .jar and .pom files.

answered Mar 19 '12 at 17:08

17sprints

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I have also solved the same issue by deleting related files in the maven local repository and then update the whole project. – Ad Infinitum Dec 09 '16 at 11:37

score 9 · Answer 10 · answered Aug 05 '13 at 22:11

9

For me , it was related to setting the "User Setting.xml" inside

Window > preferences > Maven > User Settings > and then browsing to the user Settings inside the { maven unarchived directory / }/apache-maven-2.2.1/conf/settings.xml .

answered Aug 05 '13 at 22:11

Roshan Khandelwal

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eaykin · Answer 11 · 2012-03-28T06:58:12.987

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"Failed to read artifact descriptor" problems generally indicate a problem with the dependency's pom file in the maven repository. I would suggest you to double check if the pom file's name is the same with the name maven expects, and also to check if the pom file contents are valid.

edited Mar 28 '12 at 06:58

answered Mar 26 '12 at 13:36

eaykin

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The check of the pom.xml was useful. I found I had same dependency twice (copy & paste error). After cleanup everything was fine. – Adam Bogdan Boczek Mar 08 '16 at 08:21

score 6 · Answer 12 · edited Apr 19 '17 at 15:10

I have a project

 A/
 |--a1
 |--a2

Now there is another project in our org

 B/
 |--b1
 |--b2
 |--b3

(Every module a1, b1 etc. and Parent projects A, B have their own pom.xml as per standard maven rules of parent and child)

Both projects are checked out on my local eclipse (from SVN). I am actively working on A.

I came to know that there is a good common functionality (b4) developed in B and I needed to use it.

 B/
 |--b1
 |--b2
 |--b3
 |--b4 (NEW)

Developer of b4 have deployed this b4 module as an artifact in our org's repository. I included the dependancy to my module's POM i.e. a2's pom.xml. Eclipse downloaded the reuqired artifact from repo and I could import the classes in it.

Now issue starts... I needed to check the source code of b4 for some purpose and as I already had B checked out on my local eclipse I updated it from SVN and checked out module b4. I also ran pom.xml of module b4 with targets like clean, package etc. After some time when I finishedd my coding I needed to create a JAR of my module a2. I ran "package" on a2's pom.xml and BAM!! errors n errors for a2 module.. These errors were also not very user friendly. Only thing is there was b4's name for sure in logs.

Solution: After trying for many solutions for many hours, I ran "mvn -U clean install" from console in my B's project directoty (i.e. in ../codebase/B). As B is the parent, clean install command ran for all modules including b4 and it ran successfully. After this I ran "mvn -U clean install" for my parent project which is A. And this worked! a2 module got compiled, installed, (packaged later) succesfully.

Here important point was if b4 is in your workspace do not only install b4. You will need to clean-install complete B. I came up to this solution after reading answer from Zuill

EDIT: One more thing here to note that if I didn't had B project checked out in Local environment then this issue might not have occurred for me. I tend to think that this happened cause I had B checked out in my local workspace.

score 5 · Answer 13 · answered Sep 13 '16 at 19:59

5

For me, it seems to actually have been a problem with the dependency POM.

I worked around it by using the jitpack virtual repository, with which you can include github repositories based on their URL instead of their own POM (which seems to have been erroneous in my case).

    <repository>
        <id>jitpack.io</id>
        <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
    </repository>

answered Sep 13 '16 at 19:59

Phil Rykoff

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This worked for me. The repository section of the pom.xml file should be properly updated and the tag should be the name of the repository. Saved a lot of my time! – Anuradha Fernando Sep 01 '20 at 08:07

score 5 · Answer 14 · answered Jul 10 '11 at 16:12

5

You mention two different groupIds, com.morrislgn.merchandising.common and com.johnlewis.jec.webpim.common. Maybe this is the problem.

answered Jul 10 '11 at 16:12

phlogratos

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Good spot - no, its not unfortunatly. I copied the wrong tag from the POM XML, that was the one above the tag I needed and didnt spot what I'd done. Ooops! I've edited the question to fix my stupidity! – Morrislgn Jul 10 '11 at 20:42

Toothless Seer · Answer 15 · 2016-04-30T19:46:31.917

4

Did not have any luck updating via eclipse. Had to use mvn clean install -U (which resolved everything).

edited Apr 30 '16 at 19:46

answered Dec 03 '12 at 20:00

Toothless Seer

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Gal Bracha answered this as well. Better to vote up a working answer and add comments if needed. – Brian White Dec 03 '12 at 20:24

score 4 · Answer 16 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

4

Reference Maven error "Failure to transfer..."

find ~/.m2  -name "*.lastUpdated" -exec grep -q "Could not transfer" {} \; -print -exec rm {} \;

edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

Community

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answered Jan 04 '16 at 08:33

Maverick

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score 4 · Answer 17 · answered Jan 27 '17 at 07:29

4

I had the same problem for a while and despite doing mvn -U clean install the problem was not getting solved!

I finally solved the problem by deleting the whole .m2 folder and then restarted my IDE and the problem was gone!

So sometimes the problem would rise because of some incompatibilities or problems in your local maven repository.

answered Jan 27 '17 at 07:29

sakhoshdel

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Tried doing a Maven resync while offline, and completely hosed IntelliJ. Followed your advice, deleted .m2, and now it's working like a charm! Thanks! – Victor Grazi Jun 14 '17 at 00:33

score 4 · Answer 18 · edited Sep 16 '19 at 13:35

Navigate via shell inside of your project folder and run following command:

mvn -U clean install

Usually this should already solve your problem.

If you see a message like this:

Could not resolve dependencies for project :war:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT: Failed to collect dependencies at com.sun.jersey:jersey-server:jar:1.9

Then execute:

export MAVEN_OPTS=-Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2

followed by:

mvn -U clean install

again to finally update your dependencies.

Afterwards perform clean maven build:

maven clean install

score 3 · Answer 19 · answered Jun 08 '18 at 13:29

In our case the error appeared because of the incorrect groupId renaming while some of the projects in multi-module Maven configuration references to others.

We had an aggregator project (billing-parent) with two modules (billing-api, billing):

com.company.team:billing-parent
|-com.company.team:billing-api
|-com.company.team:billing

Project billing depends on billing-api. So in its pom.xml it had:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.company.team</groupId>
    <artifactId>billing-api</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
</dependency>

We decided to rename groupId from com.company.team to com.company.team.billing. We replaced old value in parent's pom.xml and in <parent> sections of both modules. But forgot to update dependency above. So we had got configuration in which billing project references old billing-api artifact. Eventually it beaks build of the billing module after some time with the error like

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project billing: Could not resolve dependencies for project com.company.team.billing:billing:jar:3.5.1-SNAPSHOT: Failed to collect dependencies at com.company.team:billing-api:jar:3.5.1-SNAPSHOT: Failed to read artifact descriptor for com.company.team:billing-api:jar:3.5.1-SNAPSHOT: Failure to find <parent of the com.company.team:billing-parent project which is not available any more>

despite the fact that billing-api module builds without errors.

Solution 1: rename groupId in dependency as well.

Solution 2: replace groupId by the ${project.groupId} property like this:

<dependency>
    <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
    <artifactId>billing-api</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
</dependency>

Conclusion. So my advice in case you encountered with the error in multi-module configuration whould be: thoroughly check groupId and artifactId of the dependencies on neighbour modules.

score 1 · Answer 20 · answered Aug 11 '17 at 17:48

1

I had a similar problem. In my case, the version of testng in my .m2/repositories folder was corrupt, but when I deleted it & did a maven update again, everything worked fine.

answered Aug 11 '17 at 17:48

William

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score 1 · Answer 21 · answered Sep 09 '18 at 05:55

1

This error is basically saying that maven couldn't read a certain dependency from local repository. It might happend because a jar file didn't get downloaded correctly. So, go to your maven local repository and make sure there isn't any .lastUpdated extension file.

answered Sep 09 '18 at 05:55

Sandoval0992

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This was my issue. Once I deleted the lastUpdated file for the dependency which was failing it worked fine. – Prashant Kalkar Jul 10 '20 at 09:10

score 1 · Answer 22 · answered Nov 16 '20 at 10:34

I know I'm brave, nine years after the question...

For me it was a problem where sub-dependencies weren't found. I finally found the real issue by looking at the "Error Log"-view that held a An internal error occurred during: "Building".-line. Double-clicking it showed a pop-up with a stacktrace and the last cause finally disclosed a broken JAR in my local repository. I cleaned that up and Eclipse/m2e was able to work again.

score 0 · Answer 23 · answered Apr 17 '16 at 20:38

0

I had this problem in eclipse, mvn -U clean install didn't work but right clicking the project and selecting Maven->Update Project fixed it.

answered Apr 17 '16 at 20:38

gary69

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score 0 · Answer 24 · edited Jun 03 '16 at 20:09

I just started using STS Eclipse with first time using Maven. The project I setup already had its own settings.xml. If this is the case, you'll want to update your settings.xml file in run configuration.

right click the pom.xml and "Run As" -> "Run Configurations..."
where it says "User settings" click on the File button and add the settings.xml.
I think this is specific to your project but my "Goals" is set to "clean install" and I checked on "Skip Tests."

score 0 · Answer 25 · answered Apr 19 '20 at 09:26

0

This helped me:

From the IDE (Red Hat CodeReady Studio in my case).

Windows -> Show View -> Terminal -> Open/Add local terminal

Run commands as follows >

$ cd /pom-file-path/

$ mvn -U clean install

answered Apr 19 '20 at 09:26

Nhlanhla Rihlapfu

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score -6 · Answer 26 · answered Jan 11 '17 at 06:06

-6

I solved this problem by changing the maven setting.xml and repository

answered Jan 11 '17 at 06:06

wonbin2011

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That escalated quickly:) – Ad Infinitum Jan 12 '17 at 12:25

Maven: Failed to read artifact descriptor

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