In a production installation of Nexus, you'll probably want to customize the administrative password to something other than "admin123", and you might want to override the default directories that Nexus uses to store repository data. To do this, log in as the administrative user and click on Server under Configuration in the left-hand navigation menu. The server configuration screen is shown in Figure 6.1, “Nexus Server Configuration (File, SMTP, and HTTP Config)” and Figure 6.2, “Nexus Server Configuration (Security Settings, Anonymous Access)”.
This screen allows you to change:
- SMTP Settings
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Nexus sends email to users who need to recover usernames and password. To do this, you'll need to configure the SMTP server settings in this dialog. This section of the form takes an SMTP Host and Port as well as other parameters relating to SMTP authentication and encryption. You can also change the From: header of an email from Nexus.
- User Agent
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This is the identifier which Nexus uses when it is making an HTTP request. You may want to change this if Nexus needs to use an HTTP Proxy, and the Proxy will only work if the User Agent is set to a specific value.
- Additional URL Parameters
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This is a list of extra parameters to place on a GET request to a remote repository. You could use this to add identifying information to requests.
- Request Timeout
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The amount of time Nexus will wait for a request to succeed when interacting with an external, remote repository.
- Request Retry Attempts
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The number of times Nexus will retry a failed HTTP request.
- Security Settings
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You can choose to enable or disable security, enable or disable anonymous access, and set the username and password for anonymous access. If you choose to enable security, you are telling Nexus to enforce role-based access control to enforce read and write access to repositories.
The anonymous username and password is used to integrate with other realms that may need a special username for anonymous access. In other words, the username and password here is what we attempt to authorize when someone makes an anonymous request. You would change the anonymous username to “guest” if you wanted to integrate Nexus with Microsoft's Active Directory.
- Application Server Settings
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This section allows you to change the Base URL for your Nexus installation. It is used when generating links in emails and RSS feeds. The Sonatype Nexus repository is available on http://respository.sonatype.org, and it makes use of this Base URL field to ensure that links in emails and RSS feeds point to the correct URL. If you are hosting Nexus behind a proxy server and you want to make sure that Nexus always uses the specified Base URL, check the "Force Base URL" checkbox. If the Force Base URL is not checked, Nexus will craft URLs in HTTP responses based on the request URL, but it will use the Base URL when it is generating emails.
- HTTP Proxy Settings
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There are a number of HTTP Proxy settings for Nexus installations which need to be configured to use an HTTP Proxy. You can specify a host, port, and a number of authentication options which might be required by your proxy server.
- PGP Key Server Information
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Nexus Professional uses a PGP Key Server to retrieve PGP keys when validating artifact signatures. To add a new Key Server URL, enter the URL in the Key Server URL field and click on the Add button. To remove a Key Server URL, click on the URL you wish to remove from the list and click on the Remove button. Key Servers are consulted in the order that they are listed in the Key Server URLs list, to reorder your Key Server URLs, click and drag a URL in the Key Server URLs list.
