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.