On a Windows machine, the .m2 folder is expected to be located under ${user.home }.

On Windows 7 and Vista this resolves to <root>\Users\<username> and on XP it is <root>\Documents and Settings\<username>\.m2. So you'd normally see it under c:\Users\Jonathan\.m2. If you want to create a folder with a . prefix on Windows, you can simply do thi s on the command line. Go to Start->Run Type cmd and press Enter At the command prompt type md c:\Users\Jonathan\.m2 (or equivalent for your ${us er.home} value). Note that you don't actually need the .m2 location unless you want to create a d istinct user settings file, which is optional (see the Settings reference for mo re details). If you don't need a separate user settings file and don't really want the local repository under your user home you can simply set the location of your reposito ry to a different folder by modifying the global settings file (located in \conf \settings.xml). The following snippet would set the local repository to c:\Maven\repository for example: <settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd"> <localRepository>c:\Maven\repository</localRepository> ...