Reusing Artifactory's maven repo

Question

I'm trying to figure out if its possible to reuse Artifactory's maven repo on the local machine where the Artifactory server is running. The following details what I am trying to do.

I have a server where Artifactory runs and I'm planning on setting up Jenkins on the same server. If possible, I would like to have only one maven repository on the server. Since Artifactory already runs there, I would expect it is maintaining some kind of a maven repository (I looked around for it but couldn't find it).

Currently, when Jenkins uses Maven to build a maven project, it downloads the dependent jars into a local maven repo (a .m2 folder) on the server. Instead of this, would it be possible to point the settings.xml that maven is using to some local folder under Artifactory where artifactory stores all the jars? Basically, I would like maven to think that all the jars are already available in a local repo (which artifactory is maintaining) and so it wouldnt have to download all the jars from artifactory.

If maven and artifactory can share the same repo folder, this would be possible. But if Artifactory uses its own strucuture to maintain the maven repository (something other than the structure maven follows with its .m2 folder) this would not be possible.

I should state that I have very minimal knowledge of Artifactory, other than the fact that it is a maven repository manager.

Answer 1

Answering my own question here, as more research suggests that this is not possible. I found another question here on SO that states:

Artifactory uses Java Content Repository (JCR) standard to store artifacts. It is an abstraction above various storage implementations, which include filesystem, relational databases, etc. In any case, JCR manages the store by checksums (to reduce size and bandwith), so the repository is not directly browesable in the filesystem. The default implementation is storing the binaries on the filesystem (inside $ARTIFACTORY_HOME/data/filestore and the metadata in Derby DB.

How Artifactory manages repos

A blog post by the Nexus guys also suggests that this is not possible. Contrasting Nexus and Artifactory -> Contrast #2