In addition to managing and maintaining the Maven Central repository, I also serve as the administrator for two very large forge repositories: repository.apache.org and nexus.codehaus.org. This post is going to dive into the details of the best practices that I’ve developed to maintain these very large instances. I will focus on the configuration of Nexus in this post, but if you’re interested in system level details, those are documented here.

Both of these repositories have a few things in common that have driven the design:

• there are many disparate projects deploying artifacts that require fine grained access control per project
• release repositories are synced to central
• they are the most commonly used snapshot repositories in the maven ecosystem
• the majority of users are anonymously reading the snapshots
• they are transitional repositories that replace older static repositories

They also have a few things that are very different:

• Apache is a Solaris Zone
• Codehaus is an Ubuntu Jeos VM
• Apache is using httpd for reverse-proxying and ssl
• Codehaus is using Nginx for reverse-proxying and ssl

This post contains two sections, the first covers some system-wide Nexus configuration, the second contains details about adding individual projects, along with security and staging configuration. If you are setting up a public Maven repository, this post might give you some ideas about configuration and administration issues that you’ll need to think about. Continue reading →

In “A Tale of Two Repository Managers” John Smart compares Nexus to Artifactory, and covers some of the more well known features like Staging and Security.  I wanted to emphasize a few more of the other features that are often overlooked.

Most of our users download the tool, install it, and use the most straightforward features: simple proxy repositories, hosted repositories, and repository groups.  We’ve gone out of the way to make Nexus intuitive, but I often wonder if enough people know about some of the features offered as part of the base project.  Here are some of the features I would have highlighted in any comparison.

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