Re: purging release artifacts

Hi
I cannot see any tools doing that as-is, except by using a repository
manager instead of a plain HTTP server?
I remember vaguely Apache Archiva had some code doing such a cleanup
(rebuilding metadata and indexes) so maybe you can reuse this code?


On Thu, 19 Feb 2026 at 20:34, Delany <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> I deploy artifacts to a simple file server. Works perfectly.
> But there's no lifecycle management. So when I want to delete artifacts
> there is no such goal in the deploy-maven-plugin.
>
> If I try to delete files haphazardly, like `find . -name 8.4.0 -delete`
> this will remove the pom and jar files but leave the maven-metadata.xml
> unchanged.
>
> There is a goal dependency:purge-local-repository but as the name suggests
> this operates on the local maven repository.
> If I set `-Dmaven.repo.local` then maven will try to populate this
> repository with its own artifacts and for extensions and plugins.
> This approach also relies on having the project available to get all
> artifact coordinates to perform the purge (and hopefully the project still
> has every subproject for which there is a deployed artifact)
> OR i must use a script to figure out the coordinates by feeding in what the
> find command provided, which is not full-proof, since there may be
> unrelated artifacts with version 8.4.0.
>
> How do I remove artifacts from a maven repository with messing up the
> metadata?
>
> Kind regards,
> Delany