Sonatype is happy to announce the availability of Nexus 1.6. We've cut a new release for both Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional. This post walks through the changes introduced to both Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional. Nexus Open Source now supports auto block/unblock for remote repositories which may become unavailable, and Nexus Professional adds some new configuration fields for the Staging Suite. In addition to these new features, Nexus has now completed the transition to Guice, and we are providing 100% documentation coverage of the Nexus REST API.
New Features in Nexus Open Source
With this release, Nexus Open Source gains the following features:
- Auto Block/Unblock of Unreachable Remote Repositories
- Changes to the Default Group Configuration
- A User Interface for Filing Issues and Problem Reports
Auto Block/Unblock of Unreachable Remote Repositories
What happens when Nexus is unable to reach a remote repository? If you've defined a proxy repository, and the remote repository is unavailable Nexus will now automatically block the remote repository. Once a repository has been auto-blocked, Nexus will then periodically retest the remote repository and unblock the repository once it becomes available. You can control this behavior by changing the Auto-blocking Active setting under the Remote Repository Access section of the proxy repository configuration as shown in the following figure:
Changed Default Groups Configuration
We've removed "public snapshots" group from the default configuration that ships with Nexus. In Nexus 1.6, the only default repository group is the "Public" group. While the initial versions of Nexus had a separate group for snapshots, it is a better strategy to point all of your developer workstations at a single repository group.
Generating a Nexus Problem Report
We wanted to make it very easy for users to file issues in our JIRA instance. If you encounter a bug or an error in JIRA, or if you have a suggestion, you can now file a report directly from your Nexus instance. In Nexus 1.6, you can click on "File Issue" in the Nexus menu, supply your Sonatype JIRA credentials, and file a problem report.
Updates to Nexus Professional 1.6.0
A total of 59 issues were filed against Nexus Pro 1.6.0. Among the major improvements in Nexus Pro:
- Conversion from Plexus to Guice
- A Staging Profile can now define a target promotion repository
- The POM Validating Rule in the Staging Ruleset now validates a project's Parent POM
- POM Validation now tests for the presence of plugin Repositories and repositories.
Nexus Staging Profile Configuration Parameters
In Nexus 1.5, there was no way to associate a Staging Profile with a specific target promotion repository, the user performing a promotion had to select a target hosted repository when they were promoting a staging repository. In Nexus 1.6, you can define an optional "Promotion Repository" when you define a Staging Profile. If the Promotion Repository isn't set, the promotion will still ask the user to choose a promotion repository upon promotion. If the Promotion Repository is set, all artifacts promoted from this Staging Profile will be promoted to a specified promotion repository.
Improved POM Validation Rules
The POM Validation Ruleset has been modified to validate information in a project's parent POM.
Complete Nexus REST Documentation
With Nexus 1.6, we have also fully documented the Nexus REST API with Enunciate. REST documentation is not yet bundled with Nexus, look for a future release to bundle all of this reference installation and serve it directly from your Nexus instance. For now, you read full documentation of the Nexus REST API from the Sonatype web site.
Nexus is Now Powered by Google's Guice
In addition to these important features, Nexus has now completely migrated from Plexus to Guice, a lightweight dependency injection framework developed by Google. If you are a Nexus user, you won't notice any differences between the Plexus-based Nexus 1.5 and the Guice-based Nexus 1.6. As we've discussed in previous blog entries switching to Guice is part of a long-term strategy, moving to Guice will allow us to devote more of our resources to Nexus features development and less resources to maintaining Plexus.
Downloading and Installing Nexus 1.6
If you are new to repository management, Nexus is, by far, the easiest repository to install. All you need to do is download a distribution, unpack the Nexus archive, and run a simple script. Watch a demonstration of the installation process on Linux and on Windows.
- Download Nexus Open Source 1.6
- Download Nexus Professional 1.6
Upgrading to Nexus 1.6
We've changed the location of configuration files for the Java Service Wrapper startup scripts. You can see these differences if you list the contents of ${NEXUS_HOME}/bin/jsw. On a Nexus 1.5 installation you would see this:
/usr/local/nexus-professional-webapp-1.5.0 $ ls ./bin/jsw/ jsw-license/ linux-x86-64/ solaris-sparc-64/ linux-ppc-64/ macosx-universal-32/ solaris-x86-32/ linux-x86-32/ solaris-sparc-32/ windows-x86-32/
Now, on a Nexus 1.6 installation, the same directory contains different configuration folders and platform options:
/usr/localnexus-professional-webapp-1.6.0 $ ls ./bin/jsw/ conf/ linux-x86-32/ solaris-sparc-32/ lib/ linux-x86-64/ solaris-sparc-64/ license/ macosx-universal-32/ solaris-x86-32/ linux-ppc-64/ macosx-universal-64/ windows-x86-32/
If you are upgrading from a Nexus 1.5 instance to a Nexus 1.6 instance you will need to make sure that you are using the latest "nexus" script in the appropriate platform folder. If you previously installed Nexus on a Linux system and copied the ./bin/jsw/(platform)/nexus startup script to the /etc/init.d directory you will need to make sure that you copy the newer version of this nexus script (or create a symbolic link to the newer version of the script).
If you've made customizations to your startup script, the important configuration parameter to update is WRAPPER_CONF. In a Nexus 1.5 installation, the WRAPPER_CONF has the following value:
WRAPPER_CONF="../../../conf/wrapper.conf"
This should be changed to the following value in Nexus 1.6:
WRAPPER_CONF="../conf/wrapper.conf"
If you have customized the wrapper.conf, merge your changes into the new one instead of copying it, we've made several updates to the paths and set some default timeouts that you should pick up. We can't emphasize this point enough, do not just copy your own customized version of wrapper.conf atop the newer version.
In addition to this simple configuration change, you should also take note of the additional platform now available in the ./bin/jsw directory: macosx-universal-64. If you are running Nexus on a 64-bit OSX platform, you should start using this startup script instead of macosx-universal-32.
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