Setting up local repository for maven

Before couple of days i was working with my colleague on setting up a cluster in AWS for Spark Lab. One problem we ran into is every time you start a spark build it download bunch of this dependencies(In our case around 200 MB mostly because of complexity of our dependencies). We thought if every student has to download all the dependencies it would take lot of time and cost money for network bandwidth consumption. So the way we ended up solving this issue is first we ran the maven build for first user say user1. Once that script worked we copied the /user/user01/.m2/repository folder to /opt/mavenrepo directory. Then everytime some other user ran the maven script they pointed to the existing directory on that machine and use the dependencies that are already downloaded.

mvn package -Dmaven.repo.local=/opt/mavenrepo/repository