Announcing Sonatype Nexus Professional 1.3.2

April 08, 2009 By Brian Fox

2 minute read time

nx-big_large1The 1.3.2 release of Nexus Professional adds several new Nexus Plugins designed to support enterprise development.

Configuration Backup Task

This task allows you to schedule or trigger on-demand backups of all the Nexus configuration xml files. This scheduled task will create a zip archive of configuration files and preserve a configurable number of historical backups. In 1.4, this task will be hooked up to the configuration so that and changes can be automatically backed up and optionally committed to source control.

Maven Settings Templates

This plugin allows authorized Nexus users to define and update Maven settings.xml templates for their users. Multiple Templates can be created for use in different teams if you need. The default suggested settings shown in the Nexus book is also provided out of the box. There are several properties that can be automatically interpolated for the user, including the baseUrl, and userId. This release also comes with a Maven plugin that lets the user grab and update their settings with a single execution. With this combined functionality, it becomes even easier to synchronize any settings changes across your entire team. It will also make it easy to update CI settings remotely if you configure a "build" in your CI to execute and update the plugin.

Nexus Maven Plugin for Controlling Staging from the Command Line

This plugin integrates with the staging plugin in Nexus and allows you to close, drop and promote staging repositories right from the command line, or as part of a build. The nexus-maven-plugin that implements the Maven side of the settings update as well as the Staging control is open source, since it serves as a good example of how to leverage the Nexus REST API for automation.

Improved Artifact Upload Interface

Nexus 1.3.2 has a much improved artifact upload interface which allows a Nexus user to deploy multiple artifacts to Nexus at once. This streamlined interface also allows for more control over the source of GAV information during an artifact upload.

Ability to Upload a Staged Deployment in the Nexus UI

Prior to Nexus 1.3.2, the only way to activate staging was to run a deployment against a Nexus repository manager using Maven. In 1.3.2, a user can trigger a staging profile by uploading a staged deployment using the Staging Upload feature.

Eclipse P2 / Update Site aggregation

Nexus Pro 1.3 already supported P2 proxying, but this feature goes a step further. It allows you to also proxy an older update site format and aggregate it into a single P2 repository. This means it's now possible to have all your developers add a single P2 url to their Eclipse 3.4+ IDE and grab all the updates needed. This functionality is parallel to the maven repository group functionality, where the Nexus administrators control the repositories and centralize the configuration in one place.

Download a Free Nexus Pro Evaluation

To try out these features and more, Download a Free Evaluation of Nexus Pro 1.3.2, and read the free, online Neuxs Book Repository Management with Nexus.

Tags: Nexus Repo Reel, Sonatype Says, Maven, eclipse, settings, p2

Written by Brian Fox

Brian Fox is a software developer, innovator and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the open source development community, most prominently as a member of the Apache Software Foundation and former Chair of the Apache Maven project. As the CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, he is focused on building a platform for developers and DevOps professionals to build high-quality, secure applications with open source components.