Multi-level Staging and Build Promotion with Nexus Pro 1.7

July 12, 2010 By Brian Fox

3 minute read time

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.

Tags: nexus pro, Nexus Repo Reel, Sonatype Says, release, staging, multi-level staging

Written by Brian Fox

Brian Fox is a software developer, innovator and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the open source development community, most prominently as a member of the Apache Software Foundation and former Chair of the Apache Maven project. As the CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, he is focused on building a platform for developers and DevOps professionals to build high-quality, secure applications with open source components.