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.

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.