ARTIFACTORY: What to Do When Your Maven Build with Hide Existence of Unauthorized Resources Enabled Fails with a 404 Error

By default, Maven supports preemptive authentication. This means that a given client will first send an unauthenticated request. Only after the server responds with a 401 response (as the resource requires authentication), will Maven send an authenticated request. In Artifactory, when the Hide Existence of Unauthorized Resources feature is enabled, the Maven client will receive a 404 response from Artifactory following the initial unauthenticated request instead of a 401 (due to the hidden resource). Once the 404 response has been returned to the Maven client, the expected authenticated request fails.

There are two ways to overcome this behavior:

1. Via the UI, navigate to Admin tab > Security > Security Configuration and disable this feature. 

2. Configure your Maven client to send preemptive authentications by adding credentials to your settings.xml file. For example:

   <server>
        <username>*****</username>
        <password>*****</password>
        <id>central</id>
        <configuration>
          <httpConfiguration>
            <all>
              <usePreemptive>true</usePreemptive>
            </all>
          </httpConfiguration>
        </configuration>
    </server>