Maven: Failed to read artifact descriptor

I solved this issue by deleting in the repository folders where this error was shown everything except the .jar and .pom files.

"Failed to read artifact descriptor" problems generally indicate a problem with the dependency's pom file in the maven repository. I would suggest you to double check if the pom file's name is the same with the name maven expects, and also to check if the pom file contents are valid.

Navigate via shell inside of your project folder and run following command:

mvn -U clean install

Usually this should already solve your problem.

If you see a message like this:

Could not resolve dependencies for project :war:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT: Failed to collect dependencies at com.sun.jersey:jersey-server:jar:1.9

Then execute:

export MAVEN_OPTS=-Dhttps.protocols=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2

followed by:

mvn -U clean install

again to finally update your dependencies.

Afterwards perform clean maven build:

maven clean install

In our case the error appeared because of the incorrect groupId renaming while some of the projects in multi-module Maven configuration references to others.

We had an aggregator project (billing-parent) with two modules (billing-api, billing):

com.company.team:billing-parent
|-com.company.team:billing-api
|-com.company.team:billing

Project billing depends on billing-api. So in its pom.xml it had:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.company.team</groupId>
    <artifactId>billing-api</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
</dependency>

We decided to rename groupId from com.company.team to com.company.team.billing. We replaced old value in parent's pom.xml and in <parent> sections of both modules. But forgot to update dependency above. So we had got configuration in which billing project references old billing-api artifact. Eventually it beaks build of the billing module after some time with the error like

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project billing: Could not resolve dependencies for project com.company.team.billing:billing:jar:3.5.1-SNAPSHOT: Failed to collect dependencies at com.company.team:billing-api:jar:3.5.1-SNAPSHOT: Failed to read artifact descriptor for com.company.team:billing-api:jar:3.5.1-SNAPSHOT: Failure to find <parent of the com.company.team:billing-parent project which is not available any more>

despite the fact that billing-api module builds without errors.

Solution 1: rename groupId in dependency as well.

Solution 2: replace groupId by the ${project.groupId} property like this:

<dependency>
    <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
    <artifactId>billing-api</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
</dependency>

Conclusion. So my advice in case you encountered with the error in multi-module configuration whould be: thoroughly check groupId and artifactId of the dependencies on neighbour modules.

This error is basically saying that maven couldn't read a certain dependency from local repository. It might happend because a jar file didn't get downloaded correctly. So, go to your maven local repository and make sure there isn't any .lastUpdated extension file.

I know I'm brave, nine years after the question...

For me it was a problem where sub-dependencies weren't found. I finally found the real issue by looking at the "Error Log"-view that held a An internal error occurred during: "Building".-line. Double-clicking it showed a pop-up with a stacktrace and the last cause finally disclosed a broken JAR in my local repository. I cleaned that up and Eclipse/m2e was able to work again.

This helped me:

From the IDE (Red Hat CodeReady Studio in my case).

Windows -> Show View -> Terminal -> Open/Add local terminal

Run commands as follows >

$ cd /pom-file-path/

$ mvn -U clean install