As Nexus Professional exposes every feature as a REST endpoint it is very easy to automate these interactions in just about any language. This sample demonstrates who to incorporate calls to Nexus REST APIs directly from your build. It also provides a model for parsing JSON responses from Nexus and posting JSON requests. If you are interested in more of these examples, please let us know in the comments of this post. (One thing is sure, this particular example could use some improvement, please be harsh.)

This example assumes that you are using a local instance of Nexus Professional running on port 8081. It also assumes that you are using the default administrative credentials. The workflow for this example would be someone staging a release, listing the staged repositories, and than closing one of those repositories. This example is a first cut, a simple example to demonstrate that integrating Nexus REST into your Gradle build is straightforward:

$ gradle upload
$ gradle stage_list
:stage_list
sample_profile-004, closed
sample_profile-005, closed
sample_profile-006, open
$ gradle stage_close -DrepoId="sample_profile-006"
:stage_close
Repository Closed

Here’s the sample Gradle build that demonstrates how to call out to Nexus REST services. First, note that stage_list and stage_close correspond to two in-line Gradle tasks StagingCloseTask and StagingListTasks. Both of these tasks simply set up authentication and the appropriate request headers. They then make the appropriate HTTP call to Nexus REST endpoints. StagingListTask shows you how to receive JSON from Nexus REST APIs and iterate through the results, StagingCloseTask shows you how to POST a JSON document (albeit very inelegantly, it does get the job done).

%CODE1%

Note: I didn’t use HTTP Builder in the example for a reason. While HTTP Builder would have made these examples smaller, I wanted to make sure that people had a sample Grade build they could use without having to worry about extra dependencies. This script works with the latest Gradle 1.0 release.

I’m also very aware that there are likely 100 different ways to write this script and this this isn’t the most elegant solution. The point of this post is to demonstrate the possible, expect more iterations as we continue to focus on the interoperability of Nexus to expand support beyond Maven to the rich variety of build tools our customers are using.

• How do I configure my Gradle build to publish artifacts to Nexus? in Nexus OSS
• How do I configure my Gradle build to download artifacts from Nexus? in Nexus OSS
• How do I stage artifacts to a Nexus Staging Profile from a Gradle build? in Nexus Pro

In support of this week’s release of Gradle 1.0, here’s an evaluation guide for Nexus Professional using two, very simple Gradle projects. If you are evaluating Nexus Professional, or if you are just looking for some sample projects that configure a Gradle build to use a repository take a look at this guide. Take a look at this evaluation guide and download the associated sample projects. These two projects have build.gradle files that demonstrate the simplest case of configuring a Gradle build to:

• Download dependencies from a Nexus Repository Group with Gradle
• Deploy an Artifact to a Nexus Snapshot Repository from Gradle
• Staging an Artifact to a Nexus Staging Repository from Gradle

Update 2013-05: The evaluation guide has been updated and is now available in HTML and PDF format.

We were talking about creating a guide for this, but someone in the community beat us to it.  Yennick Trevels published an excellent guide in his blog that you can find here.  We highly recommend checking out his post if you want to use Gradle to deploy artifacts to the Central Repository.