Tag Archives: nexus pro

Nexus Professional 2.0.5 Released: It’s Easier to Evaluate Awesomeness


June 6, 2012 By Tim O'Brien

Nexus Pro has enhanced search capabilities that make it easy to identify which components are popular versus which components you might want to avoid.

With Nexus Pro you can track your exposure to security vulnerabilities and licensing issues. With Nexus Pro you gain control over your releases so you can place release candidate binaries in a temporary staging repository while QA tests and qualifies a release. With Nexus Pro you can control which OSS components you allow into your organization with Procurement. You can proxy the most popular source of components for Java developers (Central) alongside the most popular source of OSS components for .NET developers (NuGet Gallery). If you have distributed teams you can set up two Nexus instances and setup a Smart Proxy so that your distributed teams are always working with the latest artifacts in a distributed environment.

This impressive list of features is only available to you if you can sit down and evaluate these features and come to your own conclusions. Some of our customers take the time to go through the motions of an evaluation, but many are asking for an easier evaluation experience. In the 2.0.5 release, we’ve done just that.

A few months ago the engineering team took a long look at Nexus Professional from the perspective of a new user. What does it take to get started? What were the assumptions we were making about what users know before they download the product? And, how can we make it easier to evaluate the product?

After this exercise it became clear to us that we needed to make sure our Nexus Professional trial bundle contained a few preconfigured features along with a set of simple example projects.

Put simply, it has to be easier to evaluate the product. Our new Nexus Professional bundle “forward deploys” the following features:

  • Nexus has been preconfigured to download the search index from Central. Download Nexus Professional and give it a few minutes to download the index from Central . Once downloaded, you can start searching for artifacts. Since Nexus Professional adds valuable information to the search interface, we wanted to make sure this data was available immediately without asking users to click through a flurry of configuration screens.
  • A Staging profile has been configured to demonstrate release management. Since Staging is a primary draw for many of our customers, this version takes a step toward making it easier for a first time user to understand Staging. A Staging profile has been configured, and a sample project has been configured to stage an artifact to this profile. A new user can deploy and release via this Staging profile without having to run through pages and pages of introduction and configuration instructions.
  • Procurement has been preconfigured so you can quickly define rules for the OSS components. If you need to control your OSS components, this Nexus Professional trial bundle creates a procured repository and adds this repository to your Public group. If you need to start procuring artifacts, Procurement is up and running.
  • Nexus proxies NuGet Gallery so that you can quickly evaluate support for .NET development. This is one of the most important changes. Our Nexus Professional bundle ships with no .NET repositories configured and we were asking users to jump through pages and pages of instructions. With this trial bundle, NuGet Gallery is proxied, a new NuGet hosted repository is available, and these two repositories are combined into a NuGet group. To start using Nexus for .NET all you need to do is copy the NuGet API key into Visual Studio for authentication.

In addition to these configuration changes to our Nexus Professional trial, users can now download two simple Maven projects that are preconfigured to download and deploy artifacts from and to a local Nexus Professional instance along with a short evaluation guide to walk you through the process. Download Nexus Professional today and get started.

Sizing Nexus: How much space do you need?


January 30, 2012 By Tim O'Brien

You’ll want to make sure that you run your repository manager on a server that is up to the task. The last thing you need is for Nexus to run out of space during a critical release because it is running on inadequate hardware. Disk space is cheap, broken builds are not.

In this post, I focus on storage requirements for Nexus. I discuss general recommendations and point you at resources we’ve developed to help you come up with accurate estimates for how much disk space you’ll need.

   

Disk Space

Disk space is going to be the critical parameter for a Nexus installation. At its core, Nexus is simply a collection of files and a set of services to index and serve these files. If you integrate Nexus into your development process and come to depend on it as a collaboration mechanism, you can easily consume hundreds of gigabytes (or even terabytes) of space.

Coming up with a simple guideline for storage requirements is difficult as it depends on a number of factors: How many projects do you have? How large are the artifacts being deployed to Nexus? How frequently are these artifacts deployed? and How long do you keep your releases? How much open source are you consuming from Central? How often do you update external dependencies? and How many 3rd party artifacts do you need to upload?

If you deploy artifacts to Nexus, your internal, hosted repositories are what will end up consuming the most space over time. At a large organization with hundreds of projects and frequent releases, it is very easy to create systems that consume a surprising amount of space. If you are interested in diving into the details and coming up with an estimate for your organization, watch “Getting Scientific about Sizing Nexus”.

An Initial Starting Point

While some of our engineers like to aim high with an initial recommendation of 250-500 GB, I like to aim a little lower. Sure, if you are rolling Nexus out to a 5,000 developer installation with thousands of projects, you may very well want to start with 1 TB. On the other hand, if you are gradually rolling Nexus out to a department or two, you should start with a more reasonable number: 50 or 100 GB.

I recommend starting with 50 or 100 GB, and I also recommend being prepared to expand that number as needed. Starting with this smaller number avoids the problem of procuring a huge chunk of disk space only to watch it sit idle for the months (or years) it will take you to consume all this space. Aim low, plan to expand.

Conclusion

Your initial estimate for disk space consumption is going to be just that, an estimate. Having set up scores of Nexus instances for organizations of all sizes, my experience has been that you’ll want to do some ballpark estimates and then multiply that estimate by a factor of two or three. When you connect systems like Hudson to Nexus and deploy snapshots from every integration build, you’ll appreciate the extra space.

As you start to use Nexus, you’ll have to tweak your scheduled jobs to make sure that you are periodically removing old snapshots and regularly keeping an eye on storage. If you expand the number of projects or developers using a Nexus instance, you’ll want to revisit some of these initial estimates and make sure that your system has enough storage to keep track of all the artifacts it is caching and storing.

Nexus Gets a Stop Button


August 25, 2011 By Terry Bernstein

We’ve enhanced the leading repository manager to help you develop better software faster.  Nexus 1.9.2, recently released, adds a number of new features.

Stop Running Tasks

You can stop running processes immediately and no longer have to wait for them to complete.  This is quite useful for recovering from high load situations.  Stopping a running process is easy — just select the process and click on the cancel button (see Figure 1). You can also delete tasks without waiting for them to finish. Delete will automatically stop the process and then delete it.

Improved Maven 2 Support

You’ll get improved support for environments with both Maven 2 and Maven 3 clients. Nexus now suppresses Maven 3 metadata automatically when communicating with Maven 2 clients. This improvement allows you to use such mixed environments successfully.

Enhanced User Information

Sonatype Pro for Nexus customers can better audit who uses each Nexus server with usage information that includes userid and user agent.

Download Nexus Today

So what are you waiting for, download the latest version of Nexus OSS  or the professional version from our support site.  Learn more about Sonatype Pro for Nexus.

 

Nexus Stop Button

Figure 1. Stop running processes easily with the new cancel button

 

 

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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Multi-level Staging and Build Promotion with Nexus Pro 1.7


July 12, 2010 By Brian Fox

With the 1.7.1 release Nexus Professional now supports multi-level staging and build promotion.   With our existing staging plugin, you can release build artifacts to a temporary staging repository to allow for testing and certification before making a final decision to release artifacts to a hosted repository.   With multi-level staging, you can add additional steps to your release process.   If you need multiple levels of testing or validation, you can now define both staging profiles and “build promotion” profiles.

When you stage an artifact in Nexus Professional, Nexus creates a temporary staging repository and exposes staged artifacts in a repository group.   When you promote a staging repository with a build promotion profile, you can configure Nexus to add promoted artifacts to additional repository groups.

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