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Nexus Pro addresses enterprise repository woes


By Alex Handy
January 15, 2009 — 
For enterprise Maven wizards, the toughest part of daily life can be the analog processes surrounding development teams. Sonatype, the company founded by Maven creator Jason van Zyl has been searching for ways to make enforcing corporate policies easier through better repository management.

The company today released Nexus Professional, a beefed up version of its Maven repository management tool that now includes options to help enforce life-cycle and legal rules within binary storage systems. Nexus Professional is available for US$2,995 per year.

Brian Fox, vice president of engineering at Sonatype, said that the biggest distinction between the open-source version of Nexus and its commercial Professional version is the addition of LDAP support. Thus, Nexus Professional can now authenticate users through Active Directory.

Next on the list of Professional features is the addition of staging and promotions. “Artifacts produced by Maven are binary artifacts, and one of the things that’s important to do is to be testing and QA’ing these artifacts that come out of your build,” said Fox. “It's not sufficient to QA snapshots and later on produce and release a build.

"Previously, there was no good way to share these binary artifacts for a release. What Nexus allows you to do is deploy these artifacts, and it will create a temporary staging repository for the person who's doing a build. It will hold them there until they are promoted to the release repository.”

That means whole stacks of software related to a single project can be stored in their very own automatically created repository. This ensures no mix-ups when it comes time to deploy, as the unfinished software is quarantined in its own repository until a manager deems it worthy of promotion. This automatic staging is a new capability for Nexus Professional, but must be done manually in regular Nexus.

Fox said that staging and promotion was a big problem for previous users. “A lot of people were doing it by hand before. It required a lot of manual intervention. Then there's the Maven metadata and the hashes that needed to be updated. Now all components get promoted as a single unit,” said Fox.

Lawyers in the repository
The other big bureaucracy fix in Nexus Professional is centered on open-source policies. “Organizations aware of the legal ramifications of open source are often set up so that the developers can't use open source without prior approval. Often they have a manual setup," said Fox. "They'll set up a hosted repository that's not connected to the outside world. When a developer wants something, they have to request it. It's a heavy workflow. It's prone to errors.

“So the procurement support automates that. We're trying to take away the manual labor part of this. It allows you to create a special type of repository, which is a proxy repository. It acts sort of like a firewall. If artifacts are not explicitly allowed, they are implicitly denied. Your release builds would operate against this procurement repository.”

The procurement options allow development teams to flag entire open-source projects as safe, allowing any version to be pulled down through the repository rather than having to flag each one as a separate approved artifact.


Related Search Term(s): Maven, Nexus, open source, testing, Sonatype


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