403 Forbidden error downloading from Central Repository

Question

I am receiving the following response upon making requests to The Central Repository:

Error 403 Forbidden:

You’ve been blocked from this operation due to violation of the Central terms of service. Please see https://central.sonatype.org/blacklisted to remediate this issue.

I think my IP address may be blacklisted, what can I do?

Answer

Our automated abuse detection systems added your IP to a temporary blacklist. Per the Central Repository Terms of Service, examples of abuse include but are not limited to:

• Attempting to download all or large portions of Central (a.k.a., scraping or mirroring any content)
• Excessive consumption of artifacts or metadata
• Excessive requests or bandwidth
• Attempts to defeat or evade abuse detection mechanisms

If you believe that you may have accidentally tripped our abuse detection algorithms and your use case is legitimate, here are two preliminary steps you can take towards remediation prior to contacting our team:

• Most common build tools such as Maven should be requesting specific files and NOT directory listings (which is a common indicator of scraping activity). Make sure that you are not inadvertently making numerous directory requests within a short timeframe to avoid potential blacklisting.
• Investigate caching options (such as a repository manager) to prevent redundant requests to Central. If you already use a repository manager in your environment, ensure caching is enabled.

Contacting our team

To submit a formal request for removal from our automated blacklist, please contact Central Support.

For further information on this topic please see our full terms of service here.