I had the following setup -
maven enabled in eclipse
with full index enabled and
download repository index on start up checked
At the first it downloaded nexus-maven-repository-index.gz and I was able to search artifacts from eclipse itself.
However after couple of days I lost the .cache folder containing the nexus-maven-repository-index.gz file and now when I try to re-index it just shows
"updating index central|http://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2"
It seems like this process never ends. How can I solve the issue so that I can be able to search artifacts on eclipse itself?
Those index files are quite large with a few hundred megabytes each.
I don't think you have a way around this, you need to wait for the download to finish. I had to go through this a few times already and as far as I remember, Eclipse doesn't inform the download progress, which makes it even more annoying.