Specifying Maven's local repository location as a CLI parameter

use maven property maven.repo.local:

mvn -Dmaven.repo.local=$HOME/.my/other/repository clean install

No modifications to settings.xml are necessary.

For git:

alias mvn='mvn "-Dmaven.repo.local=$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.m2/repository"'

This uses a separate maven repository in each git repository

One kind of hacky way that would work is:

1. Add <localRepository>${m2.localRepository}</localRepository> to your settings.xml
2. In your mvn.sh or mvn.bat, add -Dm2.localRepository=<full path to home dir>/.m2/repository before the "$@" in the command that gets executed. This will make your default local repo stay where it should be.
3. Now you can use mvn -Dm2.localRepository=... <phases/goals>. Because your command line system property gets added to the command line after the one in the mvn script, it will take precedence. (At least I'm pretty sure it works that way on both windows and linux, but testing will tell.)