Hi there, When i needed a settings.xml file in the past I would copy the code from https://maven.apache.org/settings.html https://maven.apache.org/ref/4.0.0-alpha-5/maven-settings/settings.html
and replace the self-closing tag of whichever section I needed - typically servers, mirrors and profiles. The other tags would remain, like "<localRepository/>" With Maven 3 the empty/self-closing tag was ignored, but in Maven 4 the value is removed/replaced, resulting in the local repository directory set to ${pwd}. This is the case for settings.xml (what about toolchains.xml?) but not pom.xml With Maven 4.0.0-alpha-5, and I guess https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-7678 the behaviour has changed back to that of Maven 3 - an empty tag is simply ignored, it doesn't override. But while the build is successful, mvn help:effective-settings now fails with Execution default-cli of goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-help-plugin:3.4.0:effective-settings failed: Cannot invoke "org.codehaus.plexus.util.xml.Xpp3Dom.getDom()" because "configuration" is null Is this now a bug in the help plugin? Regards, Delany