I need to run a Maven 2 job on a Windows slave, but I need to be able to tell Maven what settings.xml file to use. (In this case it is under a certain user directory) The problem is, the maven core plugin for Jenkins parses the pom.xml to verify it and we are using Nexus as our Maven repository, which the settings are defined in the settings.xml file. Since I can't tell maven core plugin for Jenkins the location of the settings.xml file, it is unable to download the parent pom of the project we are building, so it fails.

The workaround I am using is to create the job using the freestyle template and pass in the settings.xml file location in my maven goal, bypassing the maven core plugin for Jenkins.