Nexus is more than just a repository manager. It is a project that has been developed using the same underlying infrastructure of Maven, and it has forced us to think about the different ways in which the components that comprise Maven can be integrated with other, more complex systems. It is a critical step toward a more mature Maven ecosystem which starts to encompass much more than just software builds. You can think of Nexus as the second major project to emerge from the Maven ecosystem – an ecosystem which includes both commercial interests as well as open source volunteers and community participants.
Sonatype is focused on improving the foundational infrastructure which will allow us to improve the quality of artifacts and their accompanying metadata in Maven Central and Maven repositories around the world. A lot of this is not especially glamorous work and though many people complain about the state of some of the Maven repositories, very few take action. Here are some of the things Sonatype is doing with Nexus to improve the state of the Maven ecosystem and expand its scope.
Community, Nexus, m2eclipse
apache, central, codehaus, Community, Nexus, open source, polyglot, repository
If your project’s artifacts are published to the Central Maven repository it is trivial for your users to add a dependency and start using your project’s library or framework, but if your project is hosted somewhere like Sourceforge and there is no repository manager or repository setup for synchronizing to the Maven Central repository, getting your artifacts into Central can be a pain. The old process for publishing your artifacts to central required several manual steps for you and for the Maven team to setup and enable an rsync location… assuming you can find a location to host your files at all.
At Sonatype, we want to make synchronizing and publishing your artifacts to central easier both for you and for us, and we want to improve the quality of repository metadata for everyone at the same time. We have setup a dedicated instance of Nexus Professional at http://oss.sonatype.org specifically to host the artifacts of other Open Source projects. In this post, I talk about the process of creating a repository for your open source and publishing artifacts that can easily be integrated into the Maven Central repository once they are published to this freely available resource.
Read more…
Maven, Nexus
central, Nexus, open source, repository
Download “Introduction to Repository Management” as a PDF
What is a Repository Manager?
- A proxy for remote repositories which caches artifacts saving both bandwidth and time required to retrieve a software artifact from a remote repository, and
- A host for internal artifacts providing an organization with a deployment target for software artifacts.
In addition to these two core features, a repository manager also allows you to manage binary software artifacts through the software development, quality assurance, and production release lifecycle. In addition to these core features, a repository manager can search software artifacts, audit development and release transactions, and integrate with external security systems such as LDAP. A repository manager is a powerful tool that encourages collaboration and provides visibility into the workflow which surrounds binary software artifacts.
Read more…
Community, Mercury, Nexus, Sonatype
central, Nexus, nexus pro, repository, repository management
Download “Introduction to Repository Management” as a PDF
Introduction
While many developers have adopted Maven as a build tool, most have yet to understand the importance of maintaining a repository manager both to proxy remote repositories and to manage and distribute software artifacts. This document defines repository and repository management, providing context for developers interested in learning how to use Sonatype’s Nexus to achieve a more efficient development cycle.
Read more…
Community, Nexus
central, Nexus, nexus pro
There are many mirrors of the Central repository out there, but they are mostly under-utilized. I believe this occurs for two reasons:
- Users don’t know they exist – it’s not easy to find a good source for these URLs and locations.
- Users don’t have confidence in the mirrors – They don’t know how frequently they are updated, and don’t have an easy way to validate they are the same files that exist on Central.
In Nexus 1.3, we have introduced new functionality to solve both of those problems.
Read more…
Maven, Nexus
central, mirrors, Nexus, repository