Sonatype Nexus 2.x: Using the REST API to clean-up your repository

Sonatype provides Nexus. An extensive artifact Repository Manager. It can hold large amounts of stored artifacts and still requests get processed quickly. Also it has an extensive easy to use API which is a definite asset. When a project has been running for a longer period (say years), the repository often gets filled with large numbers of artifacts. This can become especially troublesome if artifacts are quite large in size such as for example JSF EAR files. These artifacts might not even have been released (be part of a deployed release). Nexus provides the option to remove artifacts older than a specific date. This however might also remove artifacts which are dependencies of other artifacts (older releases) which you might want to keep. When those other artifacts are build, the build might break because the artifacts it refers to, have been removed. In order to allow more fine grained control over what to remove, I've created the following script. The script uses only the releases repository (snapshots are not taken into account. not sure what the script does there) Disclaimer: first test if this script does what you want in your situation. It is provided as is without any warranties.

Sonatype Nexus: Delete artifacts based on a selection

Sonatype Nexus provides several mechanisms to remove artifacts from the repository. You can schedule a job to keep only specified number of the latest releases (see here). You can also specifically remove a single artifact or an entire group using the API (see here). Suppose you want to make a selection though. I only want to delete artifacts from before a certain date with a specified groupid. In this article I have provided a Python 2.7 script which allows you to do just that.

The script has been created for my specific sample situation. Yours might differ. For example, I have only used the Releases repository and no snapshot versions. First check if the artifacts are the ones you expect to be selected based on your criteria before actually performing the artifact deletion. If they differ, it is easy to alter the script to suit your particular needs.

You can download the NetBeans 8.0.2 project containing the code of the script here. I've used the NetBeans Python plugin you can find here. Also I have not used any third party Python libraries so a default installation should suffice.

Deploying SOA Suite 12c artifacts from Nexus

SOA Suite 12c introduces Maven support to build and deploy artifacts. Oracle has provided extensive documentation on this. Also there already are plenty of blog posts describing how to do this. I will not repeat those posts (only shortly describe the steps). What I couldn't find quickly enough though was how to deploy artifacts from an artifact repository to an environment. This is a task often done by provisioning software such as Puppet or Jenkins. Sometimes though you want to do this from a command-line. In this post I'll briefly describe steps required to get your Continuous Delivery efforts going and how to deploy an artifact from the Nexus repository to a SOA Suite runtime environment.

Sonatype Nexus: Retrieving artifacts using the REST API or Apache Ivy

Sonatype Nexus is an often used artifact repository. In a previous blog post I have shown an example how Maven can be used to assemble and release artifacts to Nexus. In this blog post I will describe two ways how artifacts can be fetched from the Nexus repository; by using the REST API and by using Apache Ivy.

Using Maven to assemble and release artifacts to Nexus

An important part of a release process is storing artifacts in an artifact repository. Many customers use custom implementations of artifact repositories (such as file shares in combination with custom scripts) but there are also products which offer many functions of such a repository (and probably many more) out of the box so that custom implementations are not necessary anymore. Nexus is an example of a popular artifact repository. An added benefit of using a popular product to provide repository functionality is that a lot of development tools can easily be integrated with it. Maven can easily be used to compile and assemble code and deploy it to a Nexus repository.

In this blog I will provide an example of how a shell script (as an example artifact) can be packaged and deployed to Nexus by using Maven. I will use the maven-assembly-plugin to package the script, the nexus-staging-maven-plugin to deploy to Nexus and the maven-release-plugin for the version control part of the release process.