Fuse ESB Enterprise uses Maven as the primary mechanism for locating features, bundles, and their dependencies. Maven is an inherently online tool and will automatically search remote repositories if it cannot locate a dependency in a local repository. Most of the repositories Maven uses by default are accessed through the Internet. A few of them are also public repositories.

It is important to understand where the bundles for the Fuse ESB Enterprise features are stored to make sure you understand the connectivity requirements for using Fuse ESB Enterprise. It is also useful to know this information so that you understand the potential risks involved. If your systems are not able to connect to the public Internet, you can create either request a copy of the Fuse ESB Enterprise off-line repository or build a repository to be hosted on your local network.

If you start up a Fuse ESB Enterprise console and enter the features:list command you will see a complete list of the available features. The first column of the listing indicates whether each feature is installed or uninstalled. If you run this command immediately after installing Fuse ESB Enterprise, the installed features are the core Fuse ESB Enterprise features. These core features and all of their dependencies are provided in the Fuse ESB Enterprise installation under the EsbInstallDir/system directory.

All of the core features are contained locally to the installation. Maven will not need to access a network to search for anything.

If you run features:list immediately after installing Fuse ESB Enterprise, the features listed as uninstalled are the optional Fuse ESB Enterprise features. The optional features are not provided in the system repository and must be downloaded over a network connection.

The default configuration for a standalone container will look for these in the FuseSource repositories first. If it cannot find some artifacts, it will then begin looking in other repositories such as Maven central and SpringSource's repositories.

If you are working in an environment that does not allow access to the Internet, you need to make sure that all of the Fuse ESB Enterprise features you require are available from internal repositories. One way to achieve this is to create a smaller custom offline repository, which contains just the features and artifacts you need to run your application. For more details, see Generating a Custom Offline Repository.