Types of Maven archetypes catalogs

Maven Archetype plug-in allows to publish available archetypes using the catalogs. To be exact four kinds of archetype catalogs are supported:

• internal. Maintained on Maven wiki site (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/Archetypes+List) .
• remote. Located under http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/archetype-catalog.xml .
• local. Located under ~/.m2/archetype-catalog.xml .
• 3rd party. Published by 3rd parties (for example http://foo.apache.com/maven/archetype-catalog.xml).

By default Archetype plug-in (Maven 2.2.1, Archetype Plug-in 2.0-alpha-5) uses local and remote repositories to list available artifacts. You can specify catalogs to use with -DarchetypeCatalog option:

mvn archetype:generate
-DarchetypeCatalog=internal,http://foo.com/archetype-catalog.xml