Sonatype Blog
Posts by Brian Fox

Maven Central contains over 260,000 artifacts and serves over 70 million downloads every week. It has become the principal resource for exchanging Java artifacts with demand doubling year over year. Getting artifacts into Central is the most effective way to get your software to developers since every build tool that can download Java libraries knows where to look for a world of libraries and dependencies, and that single, authoritative place is Maven Central.

Earlier this year, we announced the availability of official repositories in the UK to improve performance for the users in Europe. Today we are making the artifact download statistics available to the projects whose artifacts are served by Central. This has been one of the most frequently requested features by project teams. Since the raw Central logs are larger than seven gigabytes every day, processing this data is no small undertaking.

The statistics are available to all projects hosted using Nexus at http://oss.sonatype.org, http://repository.apache.org and http://nexus.codehaus.org. These three avenues represent the majority of projects actively contributing artifacts. Nexus’ security mechanism already in place on these instances provides a mapping of repository path to project which allowed us to easily roll up the counts for each team. Read more to find out how to access your project’s statistics. (more…)

Maven Central has become an increasingly important resource for the development community at large. We’ve put several efforts forward earlier this year to help improve the content quality and to reduce the time required to get artifacts into the repository. These have matured over time and are now automatically validating artifacts. These processes are documented for Maven Projects and 3rd Party Artifacts.

To improve the experience for users in Europe, Sonatype has provisioned a new official repository in the United Kingdom. This is more than a mere mirror of Central, this system is updated in lockstep with the systems here in the US, and is managed and monitored 24×7 by Contegix, the same team watching over the US repositories. The new repository consists of two fully redundant systems running in parallel to provide complete fail-over capacity.

In addition to the new repository, we have taken several steps to improve and further secure Central itself:

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The Nexus 1.7.2 release offers an improved search interface making it even easier to locate the libraries and artifacts you need in Nexus.  Sonatype has published a version of Nexus 1.7.2 on http://repository.sonatype.org which contains some dramatic improvements to the search interface.   Download the new Nexus Open Source or Nexus Professional release and start searching for artifacts.

What is new in the Nexus 1.7.2 search interface?

• Search results now link directly to the latest version of a matching artifact.
• Selecting a search result immediately displays information about the matching artifact.  You can browse artifact information from the search interface.
• (Nexus Professional) Archive browsing and artifact metadata are available from the search interface.
• Matching artifacts of different types (pom, jar, war, zip, etc.) can be downloaded from the search results page.

This release takes the effort out of searching for artifacts in Nexus.  Here are some sceenshots of the new interface now available on http://repository.sonatype.org and soon to be available in the 1.7.2 release of Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional.

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With the 1.7.1 release Nexus Professional now supports multi-level staging and build promotion.   With our existing staging plugin, you can release build artifacts to a temporary staging repository to allow for testing and certification before making a final decision to release artifacts to a hosted repository.   With multi-level staging, you can add additional steps to your release process.   If you need multiple levels of testing or validation, you can now define both staging profiles and “build promotion” profiles.

When you stage an artifact in Nexus Professional, Nexus creates a temporary staging repository and exposes staged artifacts in a repository group.   When you promote a staging repository with a build promotion profile, you can configure Nexus to add promoted artifacts to additional repository groups.

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Sonatype is happy to announce the availability of Nexus 1.7. We’ve cut a new release for both Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional. This post walks through the changes introduced to Nexus Open Source.  (more…)