Since Nexus separates its configuration and data storage from the application, it is easy to upgrade an existing Nexus installation. To upgrade Nexus, unpack the Nexus archive in the directory which contains the existing Nexus installation. Once the archive is unpacked, the new Nexus application directory should be a sibling to your existing sonatype-work/ directory. If you have defined a symbolic link for the version of Nexus to use, change that to point at the new Nexus application directory. When you start the new instance of Nexus it will read the existing repository configuration from the sonatype-work/ directory.