Using Nexus Artifact Management in the

Enterprise

Kostis Kapelonis

Athens Greece, February 2014

Agenda

1. What is Nexus and why we

need it

2. Nexus features

3. Using Nexus in an enterprise

company for multiple projects

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Why should you care?

Why do we need an artifact

manager?

Part 1

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A bit of history

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A bit of history

The problem of using

Ant (especially with CVS)

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Binaries should not be stored in VC

Version Control

Java files

Jars

Ant

Compile

Checkout

Modern times

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Binaries should not be stored in VC

Version Control

Java files

Jars

Maven

Compile

Checkout

“Binary Repo”

Download

Maven Central

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Maven complaints

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Common Maven complaints

“Maven downloads the whole internet”

“The central repository is down”

“The central repository does not have the

latest version”

“Closed-source library X is not in the central

repository”

“I cannot publish my library in the central

repository”

“I still need to mail my colleague with my jar”

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The wrong way

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The correct way

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The need for a binary artifact manager

Is central really “central”?

Some frameworks have their own repos

Some libraries are not even “mavenised”

Big companies need to publish artifacts

as well

Maven also has snapshots

Other problems such as licences

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Different kinds of Jars/libraries

Central Other Repos

Non- Maven

Our jars

The players

Sonatype Nexus

Apache Archiva

JFrog Artifactory

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Using Nexus

Part 2

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Step 1

In your .m2/settings.xml

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Step 2

Remove all repo URLs

from your POM files.

Your project should

know nothing about

Maven repos

http://blog.sonatype.com/2009/02/why-putting-repositories-in-your-poms-is-

a-bad-idea/

Search a jar

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Search a jar (other)

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Nexus repos

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Nexus Repo types

Proxy

• 85%

• caching

Hosted

• 10%

• publishing

Virtual

• 1%

• Maven 1

Group

• 4%

• exposing

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Proxy repos

Proxy repos cache existing

repos (central, JBoss, Spring

etc)

You add new Proxy Repos as

Admin in Nexus

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Hosted repos

Hosted repos used for

uploading our artifacts on

Nexus

You can upload manually (via

Web) or via the mvn

command line

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Hosted repos

Virtual repos are used for

Maven 1 compatibility

We don’t need this, ignore it.

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Hosted repos

Group repos are used for

exposing to the outside world

the contents of Nexus

Once you add a proxy repo

you also need to “expose” it

The big picture

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Using Nexus for multiple

projects/clients

Part 3

Default Nexus Repositories out of the box

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Central Snapshots Releases

3rd Party Maven 1 Public

Some real life observations

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Do we release Quarz?

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Is Eudra an external library?

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Do we create apache POI?

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Suggested roadmap

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Suggested structure

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Admin

Publish

Read only

Suggested structure

• Releases/snapshots

• 3rd party Common

• Releases/snapshots

• Exposing group Project A

• Releases/Snapshots

• Exposing group Project B

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Suggested structure

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Nexus

Client B

Client C

We

Client A

What we give to the client

Project Source code

Project Nexus URL

Project Release

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Thank you

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More?

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