Author Archives: Brian Fox

About Brian Fox

Vice President of Engineering, Sonatype Inc.

Nexus 1.9 – Performance, Compatibility, and Dependency Browsing


April 14, 2011 By Brian Fox

Sonatype has released the latest version of our industry leading repository manager – Nexus 1.9.1

This post outlines some of the new features available in all 1.9 releases of both Nexus Professional and Nexus Open Source. This release has a lot of important, under-the-hood changes – including a number of changes to the core infrastructure of Nexus to increase Maven 3 compatibility and to incorporate open source libraries for repository interaction (Aether and Maven Indexer). In addition to a wide array of fixes and features in Nexus Open Source, you can now use Nexus Professional to analyze Maven Dependencies.

Changes in Nexus Professional 1.9.1

Nexus Professional has the following key benefits.  For a complete list of all features added and bugs fixed in Nexus Professional 1.9.1, see the official release notes (note: release notes require a log-in).

  • Moved the Custom Metadata Plugin to optional plugins – This Custom Metadata plugin is now shipped as an optional dependency. If you are using the Custom Metadata plugin you will need to copy this plugin from the optional dependencies directory to the plugins directory. Nexus will then start up this plugin the next time it is restarted.
  • The New Maven Module Dependency Report – Nexus Professional adds a helpful report for people browsing the repository. For the first time, you can click on an artifact and see a report of Maven dependencies. From this report you can click through to search for dependencies.

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Enhancements to Maven Central


March 17, 2011 By Brian Fox

Sonatype is committed to ensuring that Maven Central is a reliable resource for the community. We are continuing to invest in enhancements that improve system availability, including the conversion to virtual systems and adding redundancy to Central’s Internet connection.  These new improvements follow the deployment of the new official Maven Central repositories in the UK that enabled much faster access for all Maven users in Europe, as well as providing another geographically redundant backup of artifacts.

Virtual Servers: We now have 6 nodes running in a private cloud cluster and both Central machines in the US are fully converted to virtual machines. This will allow the two systems to be completely isolated from hardware failure and provides greater flexibility for load balancing and performance tuning.

Internet Redundancy: Maven Central is now connected to Contegix’s fully managed network which provides multiple routes to the Internet. While the existing connection had been extremely stable in the past, we believe that using the managed and redundant network is the best choice for providing a reliable service to our users. The conversion to the new network is already completed and you may notice that Maven Central now has a new IP address.

We are aware that some users have firewall rules that are locked to the external service IP. Because of this, we strive to maintain a consistent IP for each system, however the primary mechanism for accessing the repository is by DNS for most users. At times, our failover escalation or maintenance procedures may require us to redirect the DNS for one system to another. For this reason, if you have firewall rules in place that need specific IPs, please allow this list so that you won’t be affected by any temporary transitions:

  • 207.223.240.88 : US primary
  • 207.223.240.92 : US staging / standby
  • 89.167.251.252: UK Primary
  • 89.167.251.253: UK standby

Now Available: Central download statistics for OSS projects


December 15, 2010 By Brian Fox

Maven Central contains over 260,000 artifacts and serves over 70 million downloads every week. It has become the principal resource for exchanging Java artifacts with demand doubling year over year. Getting artifacts into Central is the most effective way to get your software to developers since every build tool that can download Java libraries knows where to look for a world of libraries and dependencies, and that single, authoritative place is Maven Central.

Earlier this year, we announced the availability of official repositories in the UK to improve performance for the users in Europe. Today we are making the artifact download statistics available to the projects whose artifacts are served by Central. This has been one of the most frequently requested features by project teams. Since the raw Central logs are larger than seven gigabytes every day, processing this data is no small undertaking.

The statistics are available to all projects hosted using Nexus at http://oss.sonatype.org, http://repository.apache.org and http://nexus.codehaus.org. These three avenues represent the majority of projects actively contributing artifacts. Nexus’ security mechanism already in place on these instances provides a mapping of repository path to project which allowed us to easily roll up the counts for each team. Read more to find out how to access your project’s statistics. Continue reading →

New official Maven Central repository in Europe


October 19, 2010 By Brian Fox

Maven Central has become an increasingly important resource for the development community at large. We’ve put several efforts forward earlier this year to help improve the content quality and to reduce the time required to get artifacts into the repository. These have matured over time and are now automatically validating artifacts. These processes are documented for Maven Projects and 3rd Party Artifacts.

To improve the experience for users in Europe, Sonatype has provisioned a new official repository in the United Kingdom. This is more than a mere mirror of Central, this system is updated in lockstep with the systems here in the US, and is managed and monitored 24×7 by Contegix, the same team watching over the US repositories. The new repository consists of two fully redundant systems running in parallel to provide complete fail-over capacity.

In addition to the new repository, we have taken several steps to improve and further secure Central itself:

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Nexus 1.7.2 Now Available with Improved Search Interface


August 17, 2010 By Brian Fox

The Nexus 1.7.2 release offers an improved search interface making it even easier to locate the libraries and artifacts you need in Nexus.  Sonatype has published a version of Nexus 1.7.2 on http://repository.sonatype.org which contains some dramatic improvements to the search interface.   Download the new Nexus Open Source or Nexus Professional release and start searching for artifacts.

What is new in the Nexus 1.7.2 search interface?

  • Search results now link directly to the latest version of a matching artifact.
  • Selecting a search result immediately displays information about the matching artifact.  You can browse artifact information from the search interface.
  • (Nexus Professional) Archive browsing and artifact metadata are available from the search interface.
  • Matching artifacts of different types (pom, jar, war, zip, etc.) can be downloaded from the search results page.

This release takes the effort out of searching for artifacts in Nexus.  Here are some sceenshots of the new interface now available on http://repository.sonatype.org and soon to be available in the 1.7.2 release of Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional.

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