What is this site?

Welcome to the new landing page for The Central Repository.

As custodians of the most popular repository of open source Java and other components, it has become painfully obvious to us that the there is no recognizable face to the repository.

For instance:

  • A Google search for "Maven Central" does not show relevant info in the top results.

  • It's unclear to users (consumers) and projects (producers) leveraging the Central Repository where to report issues. We've responded to issues reported via Twitter, StackOverflow, project mailing lists, Sonatype JIRA and many other places - basically anywhere we notice them.

  • It has proven to be challenging for Sonatype to communicate changes being made to the service, its current status, and scheduled maintenance.

  • Instructions for getting components into Central are so well hidden and confusing to newcomers that there is a text adventure lampooning the process.

Despite this, the Central Repository is more popular than ever.

  • The number of published components increases at a rate of approximately 54K releases across 48K projects each month.

  • Last year, there were a total 445K components published from 54K projects. Today, there are 620K components from 71K projects.

  • In less than two years, monthly download bandwidth has increased from 30 TB to 120 TB each month.

We think some of the reasons the Central Repository has continued to grow despite the warts are that

  1. The service is extremely fast and stable.

  2. The requirements for inclusion (like documentation, author-controlled signatures, contact information, sane and verified group IDs) make the contents useful for humans and development tooling.

Also, while there are public Java artifact repositories which proxy Central Repository content (as should any organization by using a repository manager), we have done the heavy lifting in terms of synchronizing and consolidating components from major OSS forges into a single namespace and publishing unified indexes and other metadata to empower the community to build tooling.

In the coming months, we intend to work on the following things:

  • Improved documentation for producers and consumers of artifacts.
  • Regular, automated publication of Central Repository statistics of interest.
  • Increased communication with the community to improve our offering further.