The following instructions are for installing Nexus as a stand-alone server. Nexus comes bundled with a Jetty instance and runs on a (configurable) port 8081 by default. If you would like to run Nexus Open Source as a web application in an existing application server or servlet container, please refer to the instructions in Section 2.8, “Installing the Nexus WAR”.
Note
The installation process for Nexus Open Source is exactly the same
as the installation process for Nexus Professional. If you are
installing Nexus Open Source, follow the directions in this section
substituting nexus-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.zip for
nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.zip and
nexus-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.tgz for
nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.tgz.
Installing Nexus is straightforward, unpack the Nexus web application archive in a directory. If you are installing Nexus on a local workstation to give it a test run, you can install it in your home directory or whenever you like; Nexus doesn't have any hard coded directories, it will run from any directory. If you downloaded the ZIP archive, run:
$ unzip nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.zip
And, if you download the GZip'd TAR archive, run:
$ tar xvzf nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.tgz
Note
There are some known incompatibilities with the version of tar provided by Solaris and the gzip tar format. If you are installing Nexus on Solaris, you must use the GNU tar application, or you will end up with corrupted files. Please see http://sunsolarisadmin.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-install-gnu-tar-in-solaris.html.
If you are installing Nexus on a server, you might want to use a
directory other than your home directory. On a Unix machine, this could be
under /usr/local/nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6 with a
symbolic link /usr/local/nexus to the nexus
directory. Using a generic symbolic link nexus to a specific version is a
common practice which makes it easier to upgrade when a newer version of
Nexus is made available.
$ sudo cp nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.tgz /usr/local $ cd /usr/local $ sudo tar xvzf nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6-bundle.tgz $ ln -s nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6 nexus
Although it isn't required for Nexus to run, you may want to set an
environment variable NEXUS_HOME in your environment
which points to the installation directory of Nexus. This chapter will
refer to this location as ${NEXUS_HOME}.
The Nexus installation directory
nexus-professional-webapp-1.3.6 has a sibling directory named
sonatype-work. This directory contains all of the
repository and configuration data for Nexus and is stored outside of the
Nexus installation directory to make it easier to upgrade to a newer
version of Nexus. By default, this directory is always a sibling to the
nexus installation directory; if you installed nexus in
/usr/local, the /usr/local/
directory would also contain a sonatype-work
subdirectory containing all of the content and configuration. The location
of the sonatype-work directory can be customized by altering the
nexus-work property in
${NEXUS_HOME}/conf/plexus.properties.
