What is Repository ?Why Repository?

A repository is a place where data or artefacts are stored and maintained for future retrieval. The repositories used by maven or the 'maven repositories' are the locations used to store the maven artefacts. Maven artefacts are stable components bundeled together and put in the central location to be used by different maven builds. Maven itself knows the structure of maven repositories in order to acquire the artifacts needed by the current build but does not have direct access to. For eg: The project testingGeek-tests(the automated tests for the TestingGeek) is making use of some common libraries which are part of another class/package testingGeek-commons. But this class is not part of the testingGeek-tests project. The best way to use testingGeek-commons package is to publish/deploy it to the central repository so that it could be downloaded whenever it is needed by testingGeek-tests maven build.