Consume Central with Eclipse Aether (and Apache Ant)

Eclipse Aether and the Aether Ant tasks retrieve all components from the Central Repository by default. No further configuration is required for access via HTTP.

Access via HTTPS can be configured by taking advantage of the fact that Aether uses the Apache Maven settings.xml, usually placed in ~/.m2, and configuring it. Alternatively you can configure a remote repository.

<remoterepo id="securecentral" url="https://repo1.maven.org/maven2">
    <releases enabled="true" updates="daily" checksums="fail"/>
    <snapshots enabled="false"/>
</remoterepo>

and use it in the resolve task.