Part of my daily routine involves managing the Sonatype OSS Repository, a free, hosted Nexus Professional instance for hosting open source project repositories . There are more than 100 projects hosted on the OSS instance, and each project has at least one release repository, one snapshot repository, and one repository group.    When we started offering this service I would create two repositories and a single repository group for each project, but as community adoption increased, I found that managing hundreds of repositories was become a very complicated and time-consuming task.  In this post, I’m going to discuss how I consolidated hundreds of repositories down to a single release repository, snapshot repository, and repository group.  I’m also going to discuss how I used Nexus security settings to partition these consolidated repositories, providing necessary isolation between separate projects.

If you are running a large instance of Nexus to manage internal development, or if you are responsible for an open source project’s installation of Nexus, you can use the approach outlined in this post. Continue reading →