There's currently no way to do that if you don't specify at least -DarchetypeArtifactId
. As per the official docs you linked:
The server id used to download the artifact is [archetypeArtifactId]-repo
hence there's no way to just browse the catalog if it's password protected (and you're not willing to expose username/password on your shell history).
In the meanwhile, you can go ahead and vote for ARCHETYPE-204. They have a patch already available since years, they probably just need a bit of a push.
UPDATE
Looking into the source code of the maven archetype project, looks like the following snippet in the settings.xml
might work for you:
<servers>
<server>
<id>archetype</id>
<username>${your username}</username>
<password>${your password}</password>
</server>
</servers>
There is a default ID of archetype
when building the Repository
object while fetching a remote catalog. I don't think it's the official way of dealing with such situations, and it's a bit dirty IMO. But it might still work for you :-)
Also, you should be able to set profiles for reusing the archetype
ID for different servers.