We’ve enhanced the leading repository manager to help you develop better software faster.  Nexus 1.9.2, recently released, adds a number of new features.

Stop Running Tasks

You can stop running processes immediately and no longer have to wait for them to complete.  This is quite useful for recovering from high load situations.  Stopping a running process is easy — just select the process and click on the cancel button (see Figure 1). You can also delete tasks without waiting for them to finish. Delete will automatically stop the process and then delete it.

Improved Maven 2 Support

You’ll get improved support for environments with both Maven 2 and Maven 3 clients. Nexus now suppresses Maven 3 metadata automatically when communicating with Maven 2 clients. This improvement allows you to use such mixed environments successfully.

Enhanced User Information

Sonatype Pro for Nexus customers can better audit who uses each Nexus server with usage information that includes userid and user agent.

Download Nexus Today

So what are you waiting for, download the latest version of Nexus OSS  or the professional version from our support site.  Learn more about Sonatype Pro for Nexus.

Figure 1. Stop running processes easily with the new cancel button

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.

To explore this new feature of Nexus Professional, consider the following workflow illustrated in the previous figure :

• Stage: A developer publishes artifacts to a QA staging profile which exposes the staged artifacts in a QA repository group.
• Promote to Beta: Once the QA team has completed testing, they promote the temporary staging repository to build promotion profile exposing the staged artifacts to a limited set of customers who have agreed to act as a beta testers.
• Release: Once this closed beta testing period is finished, the staged repository is then released.  The artifacts it contains are published to a hosted release repository and exposed via the public repository group.

To support this multi-level staging feature, configure a Build Promotion profiles to expose promoted release artifacts to additional repository groups.  Build promotion profiles are configured alongside Staging profiles in the Staging Profiles panel.When you create a Build Promotion profile, you configure it to expose promoted artifacts via selected repository groups.When you need to promote a Staging Repository to a Build Promotion Profile, you select the Staging Repositories to promote and click on the Promote button.After clicking Promote, you can then select a Build Promotion profile. For more information about Nexus Professional’s support see “Multi-level Staging and Build Promotion”, and “Configuring Build Promotion Profiles” in the Sonatype Nexus book.

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.

Sonatype is pleased to announce the 1.4.1 release of both Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional.

Nexus Open Source 1.4.1 Highlights

Nexus Plugin Console

Use the Nexus Plugin Console to list all installed Nexus plugins and browse REST services made available by installed Nexus Plugin. To open the Nexus Plugin Console, click on the Plugin Console link in the Administration section of the Nexus menu as shown in the following figure.

Once you open the Nexus Plugin Console, you will see a list of plugins installed in your Nexus installation. Clicking on a Nexus plugin in this list will display information about the plugin including: the plugin’s name, the plugin version, status, a description, SCM information about the plugin, and the URL of the plugin’s project web site.

Once you have selected a plugin from the list of installed plugin, you can browse the available REST interfaces by selecting the REST Services tab as shown in the following figure. Each plugin can contribute one or more REST services to Nexus.

This is just the first step in a fully interactive plugin console to install, remove and upgrade plugins on the fly.

An Improved Welcome Page

The welcome page for Nexus Open Source is now an easy-to-use search interface. Load Nexus in a browser, and start locating artifacts by class name, project name, or GAVC coordinate right away without having to wade through a complex search interface. This release of Nexus 1.4.1 brings the usability features Sonatype added to http://repository.sonatype.org to your own instance of Nexus.

Over 90 Stability and Usability Fixes

The 1.4.1 release of Nexus Open Source contains over 90 fixes and enhancements. From stability changes that affect the way Nexus responds to the unexpected to subtle changes to the way Nexus stores an index, the Nexus community continues to find ways to improve the efficiency and stability of a project that has become essential open source infrastructure for several large open source projects.

Nexus Professional 1.4.1 Highlights

Nexus Professional gives you the ability to store/edit/search custom metadata. This is part of a much larger index and searching upgrades coming down the road.

Viewing Artifact Metadata

When browsing repository storage or a repository index, clicking on an artifact will load the Artifact Information panel. Selecting the Artifact Metadata tab will display the interface shown in the following figure.

Artifact metadata consists of a key, a value, and a namespace. Existing metadata from an artifact’s POM is given a urn:maven namespace, and custom attributes are stored under the urn:nexus/user namespace.

Editing Artifact Metadata

Nexus Professional gives you the ability to add custom attributes to artifact metadata. To add a custom attribute, click on an artifact in Nexus, and select the Artifact Metadata tab. On the Artifact Metadata tab, click on the Add… button and a new row will be inserted into the list of attributes. Supply a key and value and click the Save button to update an artifact’s metadata. The following figure shows the Artifact Metadata panel with two custom attributes: “approvedBy” and “approved”.

Searching Artifact Metadata

Nexus Professional provides you with the ability to configure custom artifact metadata and search for artifacts with specific metadata. To search for artifacts using metadata, click on the Advanced Search link directly below the search field in the Nexus application menu to open the Search panel. Once in the search panel, click on the Keyword Search and click on Metadata Search in the search type dropdown as shown in the following figure.

Once you select the Metadata Search you will see two search fields and an operator dropdown. The two search fields are the key and value of the metadata you are searching for. The key corresponds to the key of the metadata you are searching for, and the value contains the value or value range you are searching for. The operator dropdown can be set to Equals, Matches, Bounded, or Not Equal.

One you locate a matching artfiact in the Metadata Search interface, click on the artifact and then select the Artifact Metadata to examine an artifacts metadata as shown in the following figure.

Uploading Metadata

You can also upload metadata from your build directly by attaching an RDF formatted file with the classifier “metadata”. Using this method, you can define your own namespaces that can be searched along with the defaults mentioned above.

Here’s an example of an RDF formatted file:

<urn:mycustomspace/artifact#test:release-deploy:1.0.1::jar> a <urn:mycustomspace#artifact> ;
    <urn:mycustomspace#repositoryId> "foo" ;
    <urn:mycustomspace#mavenVersion> "2.2.1" ;
    <urn:mycustomspace#releaseManager> "brianf" ;
    <urn:mycustomspace#codeCoverage> ".85" ;

You can use the maven-resources-plugin to filter and generate the data on the fly and attach it to your build with the buildhelper-maven-plugin:attach goal today. Once Nexus sees the file being deployed, the metadata is automatically added to the index on the fly.

We are working on a maven plugin to generate and manage the data from your build directly so stay tuned.

REST API

As always, everything in Nexus is available via a REST API (the UI is simply a REST client running in AJAX). All of the above operations are available for integration with plugins or other systems you may have.

Video Walk-through of the Custom Metadata Plugin

The Nexus Professional 1.4 release offers a wide array of features

• Proxy Repository Browsing – With Nexus 1.4, the local cache and logical index views have been separated into separate tabs. We found that the previous single tab with a combo box to select the source was confusing.
• Publishing Web Sites to Nexus Professional – Nexus Professional 1.4 provides you with a WebDAV endpoint for publishing a web site. You can configure a Site repository that can be used as a publishing destination for project documentation. This means you don’t have to worry about providing some alternate solution to host your reports. The full support of Nexus security applies to this new type of repository, so you can control access at a very fine grained level.
• Repository Configuration Changes
  • Fine-grained control of Redeployment for Hosted Repositories: Nexus 1.4 provides administrators a simplied way to control how a hosted repository deals with the redeployment of artifacts. You can configure a repository to allow for the redeployment of previously deployed artifacts, allow for one-time deployment, or to provide a read-only interface for clients.
• Improvements to the Staging Plugin – The staging plugin had numerous improvements in the 1.4 release to increase usability and provide new functions for staging artifact bundle and verifying that staging repositories follow user configurable rule sets.
  • Support for Staging Rulesets: Nexus Professional 1.4 provides administrators with the ability to define a set of rules to apply to staging repositories before they can be promoted. The 1.4 release can validate that staging repositories contain valid POMs, valid PGP signatures, javadocs, and sources for all artifacts. The rules are pluggable and we expect to add more rules in the near future to support the Apache repository and our OSS hosting repository
  • Support for Uploading Artifact Bundles: The staging plugin now accepts artifact bundle uploads. Artifact bundles are archives which contain one or more associated artifacts, they are used to publish artifacts to the Central Maven repository, and you can use Artifact bundles to validate artifacts uploaded to Nexus.
  • General Usability Improvements in the Staging Plugin: This release of the Staging plugin focused on usability, the Staging plugin is full of improvements that make the user interface more intuitive and easier to use.
• User Account Plugin – The User Account Plugin in Nexus Professional gives unauthenticated Nexus users the ability to sign-up for a Nexus account. When this feature is enabled, a new user would click a sign-up link, fill out a simple profile form, read a captcha, and then activate a new account via an email confirmation message. Nexus Administrators can configure the default roles and permissions that are granted to newly signed up users.
• Repository Summary Panel – The repository summary panel provides statistics and configuration information for a specific repository. Users can consult the repository summary panel to gather the necessary distribution management settings for Maven configuration.
• Security Improvements – Many improvements to the user security model. In general, it is now easier to configure custom role mappings for externally managed users, and Sonatype has paid close attention to the user interface for managing users and roles. It is easier than ever to configure and secure a Nexus repository.
  • New User Role Tree: Click on a user and then click on the user role tree to see how each role contributes to the permissions for a particular user.
  • New User Privilege Trace feature: this features allows Nexus administrators to pinpoint which roles contribute which permissions to a particular user. While the user role tree provides an intuitive interface that lists role in a hierarchy, the privilege trace panel under user administration provides an alternate view. Click on a particular permission to find the roles contribute that permission to a user.
  • New Role Tree: Since a Nexus role can consist of both roles and privileges, we’ve provided an intuitive tree browser that allows an administrator to browse the hierarchy of roles and privileges associated with a Nexus Role.
  • Fine-grained control of View Repository Privilege: Nexus added the ability to configure a role to prevent users from browsing particular repositories. This is used to provide a cleaner view to users, for example to show them only groups they use via Maven and not confuse them with all the repositories aggregated by that group.
• Integration with Atlassian Crowd – Atlassian Crowd is a capable user and directory management system that can consolidate authorization and authentication to a central server. Nexus Professional’s Atlassian Crowd plugin provides seamless integration between Nexus and Atlassian’s Crowd server.
• Automated Nexus Error Reporting – Nexus 1.4 ships with an automated error repository system which can be configured to report Nexus exceptions and errors to the Nexus Issue Tracker. If configured, the system will send data to Sonatype’s Jira instance. The information contained includes the configuration (all passwords are obfuscated) as well as a file list of the repositories and exception traces. All of this data is encrypted using public-key cryptography so only Sonatype can view the contents. We expect that this information will allow us to further refine the stability of Nexus.
• Upgrades to the Nexus Book
  • A new chapter on Nexus Best Practices.
  • A new chapter on publishing web sites to Nexus.
  • Over 100 corrections and clarifications.
  • Over 80 new figures and diagrams.
  • Addition of a New Nexus Book Cover with the Nexus Logo
  

Sonatype uses GitHub to host a number of projects including all of our books. It has been a very valuable tool for us, and we’ve already seen great benefits. The social, interactive nature of the tool allows people interested in the book to keep up with the development of the content, and we’ve already had a few contributors show up and help us write more content. Contributors can fork our books, add whole sections or correct typod and then make a simple pull request that notifies us of the changes. Because we find it so useful, I thought I’d take some time to detail the process of connecting a new Maven project to GitHub. The following post details the process of creating a new GitHub repository, importing a Maven project, and then configuring the SCM element in your project’s POM. Once you’ve done that, you can start using the Maven Release plugin to automate the SCM operations that accompany a release.

Step 1. Install Git on your local machine. If you don’t know how to do this, don’t worry, GitHub is an example of a site that values great documentation, and they have a number of helpful guides for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Step 2. Sign up for a GitHub account if you don’t already have one.

Step 3. Once you create an account, you’ll need to load your public SSH key into GitHub. When you run git, or more importantly when Maven runs Git, it isn’t going to prompt you for a username and password, it relies upon key-based authentication in SSH. Again, if you don’t know how to do this, follow one of these GitHub help documents: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

To add a public key (you can have several associated with your account), login, click on “account”, and then click on “add another public key” under the section that lists public keys.

Step 4. If you don’t already have Maven installed, download it from http://maven.apache.org and add it to your PATH. If you are looking for more detailed instructions, we have an entire chapter on the Maven installation process in Maven: The Definitive Guide.

If you can run “mvn” and “git” from the command line, you are ready to start creating a project and importing it into a new GitHub repository.

Step 5. Create a new Maven project using the archetype:generate goal. Run “mvn archetype:generate” from the command line, supply a groupId, artifactId, package name, version, and use the default quickstart Archetype.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I’ll assume you used the following parameters:

• groupId: com.sonatype.blog
• artifactId: git-demo
• version: 1.0-SNAPSHOT
• package name: com.sonatype.blog

Step 6. Change directories into the newly created “git-demo” directory and run “mvn clean install” to make sure that you can successfully build the quickstart project.

Step 7. Create a new GitHub repository. Login, and click on the GitHub logo in the upper left-hand of the web page, you should then see a list of your repositories on the right-hand side of the screen. Click on “Create a New One” next to the words “Your Repositories” (as shown below)

For the purposes of this post, I used the following values:

Once your new GitHub repository is created, GitHub will load the repository and show you some instructions. At this point, you’ll want to import the project you just created into your new GitHub repository.

Step 8. From the “git-demo” project directory, execute the following commands (substitute your Git user name for “tobrien” in the commands listed below):

   mvn clean
   git init
   git add -A
   git commit -m "Importing the git-demo project"
   git remote add origin git@github.com:tobrien/git-demo.git
   git push origin master

After running these commands, return to the GitHub interface, and you should see that your GitHub project is now full of the contents of the git-demo project. While you’ve added the project to GitHub, you still haven’t configured your Maven project to interact with GitHub, let’s do that now….

Step 9. Open up the pom.xml file of the git-demo project and add the following scm element right before the closing project element. Make sure to substitute your account name for the instances of “tobrien” in the XML snippet shown below:

 <scm>
	<connection>scm:git:git@github.com:tobrien/git-demo.git</connection>
	<url>scm:git:git@github.com:tobrien/git-demo.git</url>
	<developerConnection>scm:git:git@github.com:tobrien/git-demo.git</developerConnection>
  </scm>

After the scm element, add the following build element which forces Maven to use the most recent version of the maven-release-plugin:

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.0-beta-9</version>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

Add the pom.xml to the next commit, commit your changes, and push to GitHub:

  git add pom.xml
  git commit -m "Configuring POM for GitHub project"
  git push

Step 10. Run the Maven Release Plugin to cut the 1.0 release. Since our quickstart project is at version 1.0-SNAPSHOT, running “mvn release:prepare” is going to update the version to 1.0, commit the changes to a git-demo-1.0 tag, and then increment the version to 1.1-SNAPSHOT. Do to this, run “mvn release:prepare”.

canning for projects...
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building git-demo
[INFO]    task-segment: [release:prepare] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [release:prepare {execution: default-cli}]
[INFO] Resuming release from phase 'scm-check-modifications'
[INFO] Verifying that there are no local modifications...
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git status
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
[INFO] Checking dependencies and plugins for snapshots ...
What is the release version for "git-demo"? (com.sonatype.demo:git-demo) 1.0: :
What is SCM release tag or label for "git-demo"? (com.sonatype.demo:git-demo) git-demo-1.0: :
What is the new development version for "git-demo"? (com.sonatype.demo:git-demo) 1.1-SNAPSHOT: :
[INFO] Transforming 'git-demo'...
[INFO] Not generating release POMs
[INFO] Executing goals 'clean verify'...
[WARNING] Maven will be executed in interactive mode, but no input stream has been configured for this MavenInvoker instance.
[INFO] [INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [INFO] Building git-demo
[INFO] [INFO]    task-segment: [clean, verify]
[INFO] [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [INFO] [clean:clean {execution: default-clean}]
[INFO] [INFO] [resources:resources {execution: default-resources}]
[INFO] [WARNING] Using platform encoding (MacRoman actually) to copy filtered resources, i.e. build is platform dependent!
[INFO] [INFO] skip non existing resourceDirectory /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo/src/main/resources
[INFO] [INFO] [compiler:compile {execution: default-compile}]
[INFO] [INFO] Compiling 1 source file to /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo/target/classes
[INFO] [INFO] [resources:testResources {execution: default-testResources}]
[INFO] [WARNING] Using platform encoding (MacRoman actually) to copy filtered resources, i.e. build is platform dependent!
[INFO] [INFO] skip non existing resourceDirectory /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo/src/test/resources
[INFO] [INFO] [compiler:testCompile {execution: default-testCompile}]
[INFO] [INFO] Compiling 1 source file to /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo/target/test-classes
[INFO] [INFO] [surefire:test {execution: default-test}]
[INFO] [INFO] Surefire report directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo/target/surefire-reports
[INFO]
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------
[INFO]  T E S T S
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Running com.sonatype.demo.AppTest
[INFO] Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.032 sec
[INFO]
[INFO] Results :
[INFO]
[INFO] Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0
[INFO]
[INFO] [INFO] [jar:jar {execution: default-jar}]
[INFO] [INFO] Building jar: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo/target/git-demo-1.0.jar
[INFO] [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [INFO] Total time: 5 seconds
[INFO] [INFO] Finished at: Tue Sep 08 17:35:35 CDT 2009
[INFO] [INFO] Final Memory: 24M/80M
[INFO] [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Checking in modified POMs...
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git add pom.xml
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git status
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git commit --verbose -F /var/folders/qR/qRpEDfQcFPmRZpsXgPHOok+++TM/-Tmp-/maven-scm-2142457355.commit pom.xml
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git push
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Tagging release with the label git-demo-1.0...
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git tag -F /var/folders/qR/qRpEDfQcFPmRZpsXgPHOok+++TM/-Tmp-/maven-scm-1032558296.commit git-demo-1.0
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git push origin git-demo-1.0
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git ls-files
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Transforming 'git-demo'...
[INFO] Not removing release POMs
[INFO] Checking in modified POMs...
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git add pom.xml
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git status
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git commit --verbose -F /var/folders/qR/qRpEDfQcFPmRZpsXgPHOok+++TM/-Tmp-/maven-scm-1856882176.commit pom.xml
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Executing: /bin/sh -c cd /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo && git push
[INFO] Working directory: /Users/tobrien/temp/git-demo
[INFO] Release preparation complete.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 24 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Sep 08 17:35:45 CDT 2009
[INFO] Final Memory: 14M/80M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Step 10. After a release:prepare, the logical next step is to run a release:perform. release:perform exports the newly created git-demo-1.0 tag, builds the project and then calls deploy. If you run “release:perform” without a distributionManagement section of your POM you are going to get an error, but run it anyway just to see what the Maven Release Plugin does.

The next step on your journey involves the configuration of the distirbution management settings and the deployment of your project’s artifacts to a repository manager. Once you do that, you can completely automate the process of releasing, updating source control, and distributing your binary artifacts to a repository manager.

The Nexus 1.2.0.2 release is available for download. This release improves upon the architectural enhancements started in 1.1 for plugins.  1.2.0 also provides for greater manageability and customization of the embedded Jetty server, support for incremenetal Nexus indexes, and support for plugins.  To download this 1.2.0 release go to http://nexus.sonatype.org.  Here is an quick overview of some of the more interesting changes in this release.

• Jetty Customization: The embedded jetty is now able to consume a full jetty.xml. This means several things, first it allows you to adjust the buffers and timeouts (this is needed to work around windows bugs if you have nexus on windows). More importantly it means that proxying via https/ssl is now possible. A link to the info is available from the FAQ. Examples are also included in the bundle at conf/examples. I recommend you still review the docs.
• Incremental Index Support: Built in to 1.2 for remote repositories. Shortly we will start publishing incremental indexes on Central and Nexus will be able to download only the pieces that have changed. It is not yet publishing the incremental for downstream, but that will come shortly.
• “Clear Cache” is now called “Expire Cache”: to avoid confusion. All this does is mark files as being expired so Nexus will recheck the remote for updates. Nothing is actually cleared and the files would only be redownloaded if the timestamp on the remote is newer.
• Clean/Repair Metadata Files: Nexus is now able to rebuild Maven Metadata files to remove/fixup bad information.
• Command-line Utilities: We also have some command line tools available to separate mixed snapshot/release repositories and convert local repository formats for importing into Nexus.

See the full list of improvements and fixes here.

This 1.2.0.2 release is also the core used for the Nexus Pro 1.2 Beta. The Pro version packages several plugins around the OSS core. These plugins were discussed in a previous post. The Pro Beta is shipping today to those users that have signed up for the beta program.