How to remove jar file from local maven repository which was added with install:install-file?

Although deleting files manually works, there is an official way of removing dependencies of your project from your local (cache) repository and optionally re-resolving them from remote repositories.

The goal purge-local-repository, on the standard Maven dependency plugin, will remove the locally installed dependencies of this project from your cache. Optionally, you may re-resolve them from the remote repositories at the same time.

This should be used as part of a project phase because it applies to the dependencies for the containing project. Also transitive dependencies will be purged (locally) as well, by default.

If you want to explicitly remove a single artifact from the cache, use purge-local-repository with the manualInclude parameter. For example, from the command line:

mvn dependency:purge-local-repository -DmanualInclude="groupId:artifactId, ..."

The documentation implies that this does not remove transitive dependencies by default. If you are running with a non-standard cache location, or on multiple platforms, these are more reliable than deleting files "by hand".

The full documentation is in the maven-dependency-plugin spec.

Note: Older versions of the maven dependency plugin had a manual-purge-local-repository goal, which is now (version 2.8) implied by the use of manualInclude. The documentation for manualIncludes (with an s) should be read as well.

While there is a maven command you can execute to do this, it's easier to just delete the files manually from the repository.

Like this on windows Documents and Settings\your username\.m2 or $HOME/.m2 on Linux

At least on the current maven version you need to add the switch -DreResolve=false if you intend to remove the dependencies from your local repo without re-downloading them.

mvn dependency:purge-local-repository -DreResolve=false

removes the dependencies without downloading them again.