By default, the maven repository is created under your user_directory\.m2\repository. On Unix/Linux, this is fine. But under Windows, I prefer a different location than the default which is “C:\Documents and Settings\<user_directory>\.m2\repository”.

You can change where Maven creates the repository. Open the settings.xml in your $M2_HOME/conf directory and change the localRepository element to point to the directory where you want Maven to download artifacts to.

That’s it!