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.
To explore this new feature of Nexus Professional, consider the following workflow illustrated in the previous figure :
To support this multi-level staging feature, configure a Build Promotion profiles to expose promoted release artifacts to additional repository groups. Build promotion profiles are configured alongside Staging profiles in the Staging Profiles panel.
For more information about Nexus Professional's support see "Multi-level Staging and Build Promotion", and "Configuring Build Promotion Profiles" in the Sonatype Nexus book.