Sonatype is pleased to announce the availability of Nexus 1.5.0.   The major announcement? We’ve moved our LDAP integration into Nexus Open Source.  In addition to the LDAP changes, this release also contains some important features:  Nexus Open Source now ships with the Remote Repository Browsing plugin, and Nexus Professional now has the capability to browse repository archives and serve Javadoc.    Nexus Professional has two new plugins: the new Enterprise LDAP plugin which supports multiple LDAP servers and provides caching options for LDAP integration, and a new Branding plugin which allows you to customize the appearance of the Nexus UI.

Downloading Nexus 1.5.0

If you are already using Nexus, it is easy to upgrade.   Download the distribution, unpack it next to your sonatype-work/ directory – that’s all it takes to upgrade.   If you haven’t installed Nexus yet, download a distribution, unpack it, and run the appropriate script under ${nexus_home}/bin/jsw.   If you are not yet using a repository manager, now’s the time.

• Download Nexus Open Source 1.5.0
• Download Nexus Professional 1.5.0

The rest of this post provides an overview of some of the release highlights.

Nexus Open Source 1.5.0 Highlights

For more details, see the Nexus Open Source 1.5.0 Release Notes.

LDAP Integration in Nexus OSS: The existing Professional LDAP plugin has been moved to the OSS code base, and is now available with the OSS release (there is a new Professional plugin that greatly enhances functionality as well).

Remote Repository Browsing: We have integrated the Remote Repository Browser plugin as well, this plugin was contributed by Anders Hammar, and allows browsing of remote proxy repositories. This feature is especially handy if you are working with remote repositories hosted on Amazon’s S3 service (such as the SpringSource repository). Since it isn’t possible to browse an S3-based repository in a web browser, you can use the remote repository browsing tab to directly inspect the contents of a remote repository with the Nexus UI:

Expanded Set of Default Proxy Repositories: New installations of Nexus will now have an expanded set of default proxy repository.   This release of Nexus adds proxy repositories for Google Code and java.net’s Maven 2 and Maven 1 repositories.

Nexus Professional 1.5.0 Highlights

Enterprise LDAP Plugin: Enhancement to Nexus LDAP configuration, allowing for detailed configuration of cache parameters, configuring multiple LDAP servers, using backup mirrors, and more.

Archive Browser Plugin: Now you can view the content of common archive files (zip, jar, ear and war) right in nexus, from the storage browser, search results and index browser. Simply click on the desired archive file, and you can now browse it.

Viewing Javadoc from Nexus: In Nexus Professional, when you are browsing a repository, you can now right-click on a Javadoc artifact and select View Javadoc.

Customize the Nexus Interface with Your Logo: The optional Nexus Branding plugin, adds a branding image that will override the Sonatype logo in upper left hand portion of UI.  You can define a path to a .png file in (nexus-base-dir)/conf/plexus.properties.  The key is named branding.image.path.