[wildfly-dev] WildFly provisioned "thin" giving confusing errors on incorrect global Maven settings

TLDR: provisioning works fine, booting the server works not. Hi all, with all Hibernate ORM contributors now forced to run WildFly "provisioned in thin format" for integration tests, several people have been reporting cryptic errors such as: Failed to resolve artifact 'xerces:xercesImpl:2.11.0.SP5' (position: END_TAG seen ...resources>\n        <artifact name="xerces:xercesImpl:2.11.0.SP5"/>... @26:56) The common pattern seems to be an exception reported as "Caused by: org.jboss.modules.xml.XmlPullParserException". Turns out the problem is that they didn't have the JBoss Nexus repository activated. The provisioning tool is running with the JBoss repository being enabled - as I hardcoded this as a default - so the dependencies are actually copied into the local cache, but Maven (Aether) is keeping track of these being sourced from the JBoss Nexus, so these dependencies are unresolvable when a subsequent process is started without having the JBoss Nexus repository enabled. This could be caused by not having activated some Maven profile, or simply because the user doesn't mention the JBoss Nexus at all in his Maven global settings file, or has no global file at all. There's a number of open JIRAs and StackOverflow questions related, people are a bit lost and it seems a widespread problem [1]. I'm looking for two things: A# Could the exception be made clearer? It seems to suggest the XML is malformed, or perhaps the download corrupted, the local Maven cache needing to be nuked. B# Is there a way to boot WildFly with custom Maven configuration settings? I would want to avoid having all contributors to have to figure out they have to adjust their global Maven settings. I guess in an ideal world we'd also want to avoid needing any dependency which isn't available in Maven Central, but that seems an harder, long term goal. For the time being I'll be changing our builds to use the provisioning but avoiding the "thin" format; I'm a bit sad about that as it was very convenient, so I'm looking forward for better suggestions :) Thanks, Sanne 1 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41826619/wildfly-swarm-deployment-iss...