Nexus Repository 3.0: Most Frequently Asked Questions - Answered

July 08, 2016 By Jeffry Hesse

8 minute read time

Nexus Repository 3.0 has hit the streets and continues to spur insightful discussions on where we're headed with the platform. We recently held a one hour demonstration where we had off the chart community engagement with interactive QA. If you missed the demonstration, watch the recording here.

What we learned? One hour just wasn't enough. So we took the questions we weren't able to answer, categorized them into topics and published the answers below.  We hope you find the information useful. If you have additional questions, leave us a comment and we're happy to continue the discussion.

How to Upgrade to Nexus 3 

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We’ve received quite a few questions on Upgrade from Nexus Repository Manager 2.X to 3.X, and we thought it would be good to aggregate a few of them and describe the process of doing so, as well as what to expect.

Can I upgrade from 2.X to 3.X?

  • Yes :)

Will Nexus Repository Manager be unusable while I upgrade?

  • No! Your 2.X instance will stay up while the upgrade runs, and can be tuned if need be while the Upgrade process runs.

What happens if the Upgrade fails?

  • We’ve engineered the Upgrade path in such a way that your existing instance of 2.X will be unaffected and will go on serving up Nexus goodness just like it was before.
  • The contents of your 2.x instance are not modified, making a rollback trivial.
  • Information will be logged that you can provide to us which we can use to provide you with the world class support you’ve come to expect from Sonatype.

What prerequisites will there be?

  • Your 2.X system will need to be upgraded to the newest version of Nexus Repository Manager 2.X before you can run the Upgrade
  • We will have a lot of great documentation available to help you through the process. Make sure to read this as we will have lots of tips on how to run the process including tips on tuning the process.

How long will it take?

  • This will be variable based on how many repos you have, size of the repos, underlying storage, etc…
    • You can run the Upgrade in different configurations, which can be blazingly fast depending on if your hardware supports it.

When will Upgrade be available?

  • You will be able to Upgrade from 2.X to 3.X starting with Repository Manager 3.1

Will I be able to Upgrade everything?

  • Formats such as YUM or P2 will not be upgradeable in 3.1, those will come at a later date. You will be able to Upgrade all features currently available in 3.1, check here for more information on what features will be available.
  • Some feature names have changed between 2.X and 3.X

Will windows upgrades within Nexus 3.x have a real upgrade path via an installer?

  • Yes, via the installer you should be able to upgrade by installing to the same directory.

Will there be an official Nexus 3 container? Migration supported from existing 2.x to 3.x container?

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Can Nexus 2 and 3 be run at the same time?

  • Yes, but will need different ports.

Does nexus 3.0 fully support NPM?

  • NXRM 3.0 supports the majority of npm commands, major differences between v2 and v3 are the additions of scoped and login commands.

With support for maven, docker, npm, and bower should this be done on a single server instance of Nexus or would you suggest separating them?

  • Single server is fine. We see no reason why you would need to separate them.

How will staging be different in Nexus3?

  • Too early to say much, but given the use of Orient we have abilities to store metadata much easier.

Why the addition of blobs? What are the benefits?

  • Additional metadata is available to us by using Orient in tandem with the Blobstore, and some more ideas for the future will benefit from this.

Blobstore could use the ability (in UI or Rest) to move artifacts or groups of items from one repo to another. We won't be able to do this on the file system anymore right?

  • Correct, we do not support file system moves. We have plans to address the use cases you described, as well, although it may play out a bit differently given our additional capabilities with Orient behind the scenes.

Does Nexus deduplicate the data it stores?  I.E. upload java 8 JDK to multiple places but it is only stored once.

  • At current time it does not but this is an intended future capability.

Docker image support esp OpenShift?

Is the IQ Server plugin available for IntelliJ now?

  • Yes, it is available.

Does Nexus 3 support manual uploads when nexus is disconnected from internet?

  • Yes it supports this.

When dealing with a "raw" type, would you use the Nexus API to do an automated artifact upload? Or use something like maven deploy-file?

  • You may use curl to add items, or do a Maven site deploy such as was done in the past with Site, and in the future the Nexus UI.

3.x Roadmap

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Prior versions of Nexus Manager UI have been lacking capability of manually mass-deleting artifacts. You could only delete one artifact at a time. Does the new Nexus 3 UI support mass-selecting and mass-deleting multiple artifacts?

  • Not as of yet. There have been thoughts around this and how to handle it in a way in which allows you the best experience, more to come.

Nexus 2 was mainly centered with maven repos. We used to heavily rely on the Artifact upload GUI to upload custom artifacts. We did not see this functionality in Nexus 3.x. Any plan to include it?

  • We are currently looking at this and will likely be adding support for uploading via the UI Maven2 components in NXRM 3.1, with other formats coming later.

Will YUM and DEBIAN repositories be supported on windows hosted instances?

  • YUM is going to improve quite a bit with NXRM 3.X as we are removing some of the obstacles. I can’t confirm yet but it may be able to run on Windows as a result in the future.

I understand that Nexus 3 is a big re-write, how much compatibility has been retained for plug-ins, APIs, User Tokens?

  • Internal APIs have changed quite a bit, plugins written against NXRM 2.x will likely need to be rewritten as a result.

Can you please comment on ETA when can we expect the re-envisioned Maven repos?

  • Maven2 repos are currently in NXRM 3.0, and the format itself will stay the same. Over the course of 3.1 and 3.2 we are adding more features such as a replacement for repo targets, group routing.

Is Nexus Pro 3 out as GA?

  • No, the first bits of Pro will be coming in NXRM 3.1, with more features coming in each forthcoming release.

Will there be functionality added to the Nexus GUI to allow for a "mass" upload (versus the individual component that is available today)?

  • Nothing planned as of yet, but it’s good feedback.

When will nexus 3.X final version be released?

  • Software is never finished, so maybe never. We are here to serve our customers and the community needs will ultimately change over time. However, I believe your question is when will NXRM 3.x with all the features from NXRM 2.x be released? If that’s your query, feel free to ping me with the features you are looking for so I can better answer this.

Tags: Nuget, npm, Nexus 3, Docker, artifacts, Bower, Nexus Repository, java

Written by Jeffry Hesse

Jeffry works as a Community Product Owner, where he works to help nurture new and existing contributions to the Sonatype Nexus platform. He writes code with others to give people examples on how to create plugins and contributions for Sonatype products and generally aims to foster a spirit of creativity and contribution in the Open Source community.