Video: Nexus Basics in 110 Seconds
If your build relies on Maven Central, and you’re not using a repository manager, you are wasting valuable time and bandwidth by continually downloading the same artifacts, over and over again.
But the good news is, with a Nexus repository manager you don’t need to worry about this ever again.
This video gives a quick overview of the benefits of using a Nexus to proxy Maven Central. It also goes over how to store third party libraries, and host artifacts.
Watch the video below:
Where is m2eclipse?
Last week saw the release of Eclipse Indigo, which is the annual release of Eclipse projects. This year 62 projects were included in the release, including m2eclipse from Sonatype. However, since Indigo’s release there have been some questions as to where users can find m2eclipse.
Sonatype software developer Pascal Rapicault recently answered those questions on his blog, and we’re passing the information on to you.
Helpful links:
- m2e is now a project of the Eclipse Foundation: http://www.eclipse.org
- The landing page for the project is: http://www.eclipse.org/m2e
- Bug reports go there: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/enter_bug.cgi?product=m2e and
- User mailing list: https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/m2e-users
- Dev mailing list: https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/m2e-dev
- m2e comes prepackaged in the latest Eclipse IDE for Java Developers
- m2e is also available from the Indigo repository, and can be installed using Help > Installed New Software.
Maven Central Building Blocks
In my last post, I explained the REST-style API that underlies Maven Central’s browser-based search UI. That API essentially comes “for free” with the main components on which Maven Central Search is built:
- Apache Solr, the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project — http://lucene.apache.org/solr
- ajax-solr — http://evolvingweb.github.com/ajax-solr
In this post, I will highlight those components and describe how they were used to implement Maven Central Search.
When we started the project, we looked at a couple of options for implementing search, including Solr and the existing Nexus search capability built directly on top of Apache Lucene. The Nexus approach initially seemed compelling as we clearly have significant experience with it and Nexus search even provides a REST API for full-text search that we could have leveraged. So, why did we end up choosing Solr when we could have simply re-used the search functionality in Nexus or even crafted a web UI backed by an instance of Nexus running on top of Central? Two reasons:
- Flexibility — We discovered early on during the design phase of Central Search that we needed changes to the schemas, fields, and even field contents in the Lucene indices being used by Nexus. Making those changes to the schemas would have required other changes within the Nexus codebase. With Solr, we could simply point our Solr installation against an existing index or even have Solr build a new index from scratch by adding documents through Solr’s REST API. We could rapidly prototype schema changes (often in 1-2 lines of xml and not even requiring us to restart Solr) and see our updated search results almost immediately.
- Scalability — Solr bills itself as an “enterprise search platform.” One of the enterprise features that attracted us to Solr was its built-in support for replication. As query load increases in the future, we can simply balance that load across hardware serving multiple copies of the same data. Solr’s support for multiple indexes also leaves us a path open for sharding our index data, once it becomes so large as to be difficult to serve out of a single index on a single server.
Nexus Tips and Tricks: Backup Nexus
Sonatype is looking through the archives and re-posting popular articles for those new to Sonatype tools.
The first blog in the series is by Sonatype software developer Juven Xu, on backing up Nexus.
Nexus is the industry leading repository manager that helps reduce build times and increase your control of open source artifacts by managing software artifacts required for development, deployment, and provisioning. Nexus greatly simplifies the maintenance of your own internal repositories and access to external repositories such as Maven Central. With Nexus you can completely control access to, and deployment of, every artifact in your organization from a single location.
If you are already using Nexus, this article will teach you how to back up your repository manager (if you don’t use Nexus, you can click here for more information).
Why Backup
To backup Nexus simply means to make a copy of your Nexus files for safekeeping. The copy should be stored on different hardware, other than the original one. For example, you might want to copy your Nexus settings in the sonatype-work/nexus/config folder to a removable hard disk.
It is important to backup your Nexus files because sometimes things fail. Hard disk might crash, files might be deleted by other programs, even ourselves might delete important files by mistake. With a backup, you will be protected from these frustrating events.
Hudson book coming soon!
Sonatype is happy to be helping the Hudson community with our support of the Hudson book.
The goal of the Hudson book is to be the authoritative source of documentation for Hudson users. We expect it to be available soon. Stay tuned to this blog for updates on the availability of the Hudson book.
For the perspective of one of the key contributors to the project, see Manfred Moser’s recent blog post, “Hudson – Book, Changes, and Community.“
Since the [Hudson] project lives on github it is pretty easy to follow the usual clone, branch, hack, commit, pull request sort of flow and thanks to Maven the build is as easy as .. surprise .. mvn clean install.
Read more of Manfred’s blog on Simpligility.
