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.

For a number of reasons you might want to require your developers to use a staging repository.    Staged software releases in Nexus Professional are the best way to enable your development team to push a release to an artifact repository such as Nexus while providing management and quality assurance with a way to test and approve a release before “burning” it to production.  If you want to learn how to make a staged release, you can watch this video. or read the remainder of this blog post. First step, is to download Nexus Professional if you don’t already have it installed, you can do so, by going to the Nexus Professional product page and clicking on the download link in the right-hand menu.   Once you’ve downloaded Nexus, log in as an administrator as you must have administrative rights to perform the following configuration:

1. From Nexus, click on the ‘Repositories’ link in left navigation.
2. Click on the repository you want to use, or create one (If you need help with that take a look at the Nexus book, here)
3. Click on the ‘Configuration’ tab.
4. Set the ‘Allow Deployment’ field to false.
5. Click the Save button.

That is it! Users will not be able to deploy or upload artifacts directly to the repository.  All artifacts must be staged and promoted to this repository.  For more information on staging and promoting take a look at this,  or with the maven plugin, here.

Create a Staging repository

To create a staging repository:

1. From Nexus, click on the ‘Staging’ link in left navigation.
2. Click the ‘Add’ button then the ‘Staging Profile’ item.
3. Enter the following information:
   • Profile Name: Staging Demo Profile
   • Profile Repository Target: All (Maven2)
   • Staging Repository ID Template: staging-demo
   • Staging Repository Name Template: Staging Demo
   • Staging Repository Template: Default Release Hosted Repository Template
   • Target Groups: Public Releases
4. Click the ‘Save’ button

Assign permissions to users

A new role is created for each staging profile that is created ( in this example the role is ‘Staging Deployer: (Staging Demo Profile)’).  Assign the new role to your users.  You can find more details on user management, here.

Here’s a video that discusses the benefits of Hosted Repositories and how Nexus Professional’s Staging Suite introduces the concept of the managed release. With the Staging Suite, you can configure filters that will automatically intercept a deployment to a Hosted Repository. Once the staging suite intercepts these artifacts, they will be placed in a temporary staging repository and a QA or administrative user will be sent a notification that a staged release is ready for approval or disposal. This mechanism allows a QA group to certify a release, once a release has been certified it can be promoted, and the contents of the temporary staging repository will be published to the hosted repository.

Nexus Professional: What is Staging? from Sonatype on Vimeo.

Download Nexus Professional.