We know you are out there. You downloaded Nexus 1.9 or 1.8 last year, or maybe you are still running a version of Nexus 1.4 that is years out of date. Well, if this is you, you are missing out on some important features and bug fixes. Read this post for some good reasons to upgrade, and then go to http://www.sonatype.org to download the latest version of Nexus 2.
Note: If you haven't noticed, we've redesigned our sonatype.org site to focus on making it easier to download Nexus. If you get lost on the new web site just keep on clicking on the green buttons.
Let's run through a few of the key differences between pre-2.x Nexus and the current version:
- The license changed from Affero GNU Public License (AGPL) to Eclipse Public License (EPL): From an end-user perspective this might not seem like a big deal, but, trust me, this is huge (and likely deserves another blog post). Nexus was covered under the AGPL for years, but we've decided to change to a less restrictive license to encourage more involvement. What should users expect? Over the next few years, you'll see a more robust ecosystem of open source collaboration including not only new individuals but other companies writing plugins to integrate Nexus with everything.
- File content validation: Nexus performs a few sanity checks against download artifacts to ensure that it is downloading valid content. If you've ever tried to use Nexus in an environment that uses a proxy server or a captive logic screen, you'll understand why this feature is essential. Nexus doesn't just check for a response, it understand the format of an artifact and attempts to verify formats like "tar", "swc", "swf", "zip", etc.
- Simpler Start-up Scripts: This is one of my favorite changes to Nexus because it cuts down on documentation. If you want to start Nexus, you don't have to run a platform-specific script, just go to "./bin/nexus". This change makes for a more efficient installation experience.
- Application monitoring via JMX: If you need to monitor and keep track of metrics for your Nexus instance, we've added support for JMX monitoring. This feature isn't enabled by default, but to see some examples of how to activate it, see the conf/examples/jetty-jmx.xml file.
- Improved support for Multibyte Characters: Does your Nexus instance need to render multibyte characters (such as Kanji), Nexus now has a more intelligent approach to rendering these characters in the UI.
- Revamped Logging Infrastructure: The 2.x release was a chance for the Nexus team to focus on our logging subsystem. Nexus now uses logback and a lot of attention was paid to making sure that the Nexus logs are efficient and relevant to Nexus administrators. If you are new to Nexus this might seem like some inside baseball, but if you are someone who has customized Nexus logging you may need to do some work to migrate to Nexus 2.
- Integration with the Insight Repository Health Check, Extending Nexus with Capabilities, and Many UI Improvements..... for a full list of reasons to upgrade to Nexus 2.0 take a look at the Release Notes.
I could write pages and pages about some of these elements, and we haven't even shown people what is possible with the new Capabilities extension points. Expect to see more posts about some of the changes outlined in this post, but also about some of the work done on the core of Nexus. Nexus 2.0 is more "performant", more stable and reliable. If you are running an older version of Nexus, there's no reason not to upgrade today.
