I am very close to finally having a working setup with archiva and maven.

The last thing that's really boggling me, is how to set up my internal and snapshot repositories - without using a profile which contains activeByDefault set to true.

I am using a SUPER super pom - a company-wide pom which contains distributionManagement information for releases. I was thinking that I could specify the repositories in this pom, and configure the authentication settings in settings.xml? Can I use repositories tag without a profile? There should be no "profile" for my internal and snapshot repositories, as they will never change...

What I'm trying to steer clear from, is using a "default" profile, which is active all the time. I hear activeByDefault is NOT a best practice and I don't intend to use it.

With that said, how should I go about doing this? My internal repo is a mirror of the maven central repo, so I would like to lock down my developers to ONLY use our internal artifact server. Remember - I do NOT want a profile with activeByDefault set to true. I cannot stress this enough! Should I use Maven mirrors? Should I "add" additional repositories?

If I take the repositories tag instead of the mirrors tag, will maven force builds to use ONLY my archiva settings, instead of the default maven central?

Or is what I seek to accomplish able to be done using only the mirrors tag in maven? I know how to configure repo credentials when using repositories tag, but not with mirrors. How is this done? Is providing credentials for anything in mirrors tags the same as for anything in repositories tags?

Am I missing something obvious? I've had it up to here with getting things up and running using maven. I know it will be worthwhile in the end, but it is surely causing me a ton of aggravation and resources seem to be sparse. Either that, or people are content using it however they please without regard to best-practices.

Thank you