How to prevent creating ~/.m2 ?

[xycabcd]

It seems like this extension will try to find a corresponding artifact of a "java.project.referencedLibraries" referenced library in Maven Central. Then a default Maven is invoked and downloads them to ~/.m2 for uses like showing definitions. However, I do not want file appearing in my home directory. How would I prevent this behavior?

[cookesan]

There are two separate controls that are useful here.

If you only want to stop Maven from going to remote repositories while the Java importer is running, enable Maven offline mode:

{
  "java.import.maven.offline.enabled": true
}

If the main issue is specifically that Maven is writing to ~/.m2, point vscode-java at a Maven settings.xml that uses a different local repository:

{
  "java.configuration.maven.userSettings": "/absolute/path/to/vscode-java-maven-settings.xml"
}

Example vscode-java-maven-settings.xml:

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.2.0"
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.2.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.2.0.xsd">
  <localRepository>/absolute/path/to/some/cache/m2-repository</localRepository>
</settings>

So the practical setup is: use java.import.maven.offline.enabled if you want no downloads, and use java.configuration.maven.userSettings plus <localRepository> if downloads/cache are OK but should not be under your home directory.