Downloading Nexus 1.5.0

If you are already using Nexus, it is easy to upgrade.   Download the distribution, unpack it next to your sonatype-work/ directory – that’s all it takes to upgrade.   If you haven’t installed Nexus yet, download a distribution, unpack it, and run the appropriate script under ${nexus_home}/bin/jsw.   If you are not yet using a repository manager, now’s the time.

• Download Nexus Open Source 1.5.0
• Download Nexus Professional 1.5.0

The rest of this post provides an overview of some of the release highlights.

Nexus Open Source 1.5.0 Highlights

For more details, see the Nexus Open Source 1.5.0 Release Notes.

LDAP Integration in Nexus OSS: The existing Professional LDAP plugin has been moved to the OSS code base, and is now available with the OSS release (there is a new Professional plugin that greatly enhances functionality as well).

Remote Repository Browsing: We have integrated the Remote Repository Browser plugin as well, this plugin was contributed by Anders Hammar, and allows browsing of remote proxy repositories. This feature is especially handy if you are working with remote repositories hosted on Amazon’s S3 service (such as the SpringSource repository). Since it isn’t possible to browse an S3-based repository in a web browser, you can use the remote repository browsing tab to directly inspect the contents of a remote repository with the Nexus UI:

Expanded Set of Default Proxy Repositories: New installations of Nexus will now have an expanded set of default proxy repository.   This release of Nexus adds proxy repositories for Google Code and java.net’s Maven 2 and Maven 1 repositories.

Nexus Professional 1.5.0 Highlights

Enterprise LDAP Plugin: Enhancement to Nexus LDAP configuration, allowing for detailed configuration of cache parameters, configuring multiple LDAP servers, using backup mirrors, and more.

Archive Browser Plugin: Now you can view the content of common archive files (zip, jar, ear and war) right in nexus, from the storage browser, search results and index browser. Simply click on the desired archive file, and you can now browse it.

Viewing Javadoc from Nexus: In Nexus Professional, when you are browsing a repository, you can now right-click on a Javadoc artifact and select View Javadoc.

Customize the Nexus Interface with Your Logo: The optional Nexus Branding plugin, adds a branding image that will override the Sonatype logo in upper left hand portion of UI.  You can define a path to a .png file in (nexus-base-dir)/conf/plexus.properties.  The key is named branding.image.path.

As we transition this feature to Nexus Open Source, we are also announcing a new Nexus Enterprise LDAP plugin that will support more advanced deployment use cases including support for federated LDAP servers and more intelligent caching of authentication information.

Features included in the newly open-source Nexus Professional LDAP plugin:

• Active Directory Support
• Authentication via Bind, SASL, or attribute
• Ability to map LDAP groups to Nexus Roles
• Ability to assign an LDAP user a specific role
• Support for common security models used in Active Directory and LDAP.
• Support for Static and Dynamic Groups

Authentication

The Nexus LDAP Authentication Realm which will be available in the Open Source LDAP plugin supports a number of integration patterns for authentication including:

• Authentication via a bind: Delegates authentication to the LDAP server
• SASL Authentication: Delegates a SASL authentaction to the LDAP server
• Password Attribute: Nexus checks an encrypted field in the user records.

Role Mapping

Nexus Open Source can now be configured to map LDAP groups to Nexus roles . Setting up Nexus to use LDAP groups means you only need to make changes in one location. The next time a user logs in, changes a password, or assigns roles Nexus will automatically synchronize with the LDAP server and these changes will automatically take effect the next time the user logs into the Nexus server. It is also possible to grant users Nexus specific roles, or only use LDAP for authentication and leave the authorization to Nexus.   Brian Fox discussed three approaches to user management in a previous blog post: Three Approaches to User Management in Nexus .

Support for Multiple Security Models for User and Group Mapping Nexus supports all of the common security models used in LDAP servers.   This includes data models used in products like Microsoft’s Active Directory and standards-driven approaches such as posix.  We’ve had a lot of positive customer feedback about the intuitive configuration interface which lets you test the role and user mapping from the Nexus administrative interface    If you need to make a change to a group or role mapping, you can test it immediately in the context of Nexus to see if users and groups are being retrieved from your LDAP, Active Directory, or Crowd server.

Support for Static and Dynamic Groups Users and groups can be mapped one of two ways in LDAP. Dynamic groups are defined by the user object, whereas static groups are defined by the group. The trade off is speed to ease of management. For dynamic groups one simple query is need to get the user information and which groups that user belongs to, as it is all in one object. With static groups two queries are needed, one to get the user information, and another to check which groups the users is part of. Some LDAP setups user one or the other, some have both where the information is synchronized using triggers.

Stay Tuned

So where’s the plugin?   How can you install it?  Stay tuned, the Nexus 1.5.0 release will be available this Wednesday afternoon.   Once that release is completed, we will post detailed instructions for people interested in installing Nexus 1.5.0 or upgrading from a prior Nexus installation.

Nexus Professional LDAP Integration from Sonatype on Vimeo.

For more information about Nexus Professional, go to http://www.sonatype.com/products/nexus.