Nexus 1.8.0.1 Functionality and Fixes

November 22, 2010 By Brian Demers

4 minute read time

The latest release of Nexus, 1.8.0.1 has been released. In this blog post you will find some of the new functionality and fixes. Click here to download the latest version of Nexus.

64bit Windows Wrapper Support

JIRA Ticket: https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NEXUS-3844

We have compiled the 64 bit windows libraries for jsw 3.2.3 and now include them in our distributions of Nexus.

Maven 3 Metadata

JIRA Ticket: https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NEXUS-3806

Maven 3 generates Maven-metadata with extra content that prior versions of Nexus wouldn't accept. Nexus now handles this metadata change, without complaining.

Also, if you find yourself stuck on an older release of Nexus for some particular reason, you can download this patched jar file to make your Nexus (back to version 1.3.6) work with Maven 3 deployed metadata:

https://repository.sonatype.org/content/repositories/third-party/org/apache/maven/mercury/mercury-md-shared/1.0-alpha-6-SONATYPE/mercury-md-shared-1.0-alpha-6-SONATYPE.jar

Simply install this jar file in (install-dir)/runtime/app/nexus/lib

Make sure to remove the existing mercury-md-shared-1.0-alpha-6.jar file.

Amazon S3 Repositories

JIRA Ticket: https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NXCM-2189

S3 Repositories have been very troublesome in the past with our repository auto blocking methods. With Nexus 1.8.0.1 S3 repositories will no longer be automatically blocked.

Concurrent Access of files

JIRA Ticket: Numerous

There have been numerous reports of problems related to concurrent access to artifacts. We are happy to report that these issues have been resolved.

Feed Access

JIRA Ticket: https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NEXUS-3730

It was discovered that the feed access was being serialized. This could cause Nexus to be slow to respond to requests on a busy system, as every single request to Nexus gets written to the feed. This area has been reworked, and is no longer problematic.

Captive Portal HTML Page detection

JIRA Ticket: https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NEXUS-3709

Some remote repositories don't handle missing files just as we would expect, instead they send back a status 200 (OK) with an error html page. Nexus would see this OK response, and stream the html page into the artifact that was requested. This process would leave invalid files in the cache for people to retrieve.

With Nexus 1.8.0.1 there is a new 'file content validation' setting for the proxy repositories, that will validate the proper file type is actually being retrieved. This flag is disabled by default, but can be turned on for any remote repository that acts this way.

Note: If you travel with Nexus on your laptop, you'll want to enable this feature for all repos.

Other relevant bug fixes

Tags: Sonatype Says

Written by Brian Demers

Brian is a Developer Advocate at Okta. He has a strong knowledge of Java including experience with an array of java and web-base technologies, along with involvement in open source communities.