What is the difference between maven and nexus

That way only one user have to download the artifact and all the others can use the artifact from the central cache. Otherwise you would have to specify all needed additional repositories inside your settings. Nexus also can be configured to download remote indexes and index the local artifacts for faster access from inside your network. Additionally it allows you to upload and distribute your own artifacts.

Of course this makes it a lot easier to manage and handle artifacts in a single place instead of copying and moving them manually. It's also easier to make backups of your artifacts. A repository manager helps you to speed up your development experience because you don't have to contact all remote repositories during your builds. For release versions this is not a big deal, because they are only downloaded once. But for snapshot versions the remote repositories are contacted each day by default to look or newer versions.

There are several options to configure this behavior for the repository manager. For example if you know that artifacts don't change often for a remote repository Nexus doesn't need to check for it every 24h. Additionally it can download remote indexes at night so that you have the newest indexes but don't have to wait for it during development.

There are more features depending on the repository manager you choose but I guess you now have an idea what the advantages are. Cant we do the above configuration? Very intuitive, nothing more than a minute labor. Using mvn deploy, the 1. And now for Nexus, it comes preconfigured with a handful of privileges in advance. My first aim was to define a new Repository Target privilege with deploy permissions to releases and snapshots repositories.

Alas, unlike Artifactory where one can check uncheck any local or remote repository or use a palette to add remove a repository for a permission, Nexus allows you to include only a single repository or repository group as a target. Finally it worked. The somewhat unintuitive process took me about 15 minutes to manage. To recap, security policies and deployment settings are easier, and more intuitive using Artifactory. Artifactory also lets you easily define inclusion and exclusion patterns for a more fine grained control over what is available for deployment and by whom.

Repositories configuration and capabilities is an essence of both products. Nexus repositories can only server release or snapshot artifacts, while Artifactory also supports storing both. Artifactory has a very nifty feature to include exclude pattern for remote repositories which comes handy once you want to avoid looking up remote artifacts on repositories that will never contain those artifacts.

Nexus on the other hand contains specific permissions to restrict a repository browsing and searching via a web browser. Both Nexus and Artifactory have configurable caching policy for caching remote snapshot artifacts. Artifactory artifacts under a remote repository can be accessed via a URL pattern which serves only already cached artifacts without hitting the remote repository.

This behavior can be disabled per repository. The second field for comparison is hosted Nexus versus local Artifactory repositories:. Same here, Artifactory has a mixture of release snapshot repositories, include exclude patterns and POM Consistency Checks.

One can also configure unique snapshot policy: unique snapshots using timestamp and build number, non-unique snapshots, or respect user snapshot policy.

Nexus on the other hand can be configured to allow disallow redeployment default allow for snapshots, disallowed for releases which is enforced by Artifactory only via permissions. This feature allows one to combine a group of repositories via a single URL. Thus, one can change the participating repositories and their rules without requiring any client-side changes. Artifactory has the ability to nest virtual repositories one inside another.

Auditing is much easier using Artifactory, which contains an access log for security-related events. Specifically:logins, artifacts downloads and deployments. This log is viewable from the Artifactory UI, and can be downloaded. Nexus on the other hand contains a unique feature of RSS feeds for specific events. Namely: for downloaded and deployed artifacts, logins, system configuration changes and checksum errors. Artifactory currently does not support RSS feeds.

You can jump to the conclusion section to see my own choice and the reasons for it. For now, I want to mention Artifactory unique feature of integration with CI servers.

JFrog has announced Artifactory Hudson Integration in the upcoming release 2. The idea is that the reproducible information can only be captured at build time, typically done by a CI Server: version ranges, plugins and properties can change from build to build. The CI Server Hudson in this case has all necessary data to reproduce the build, and is the only mean to guarantee a release. That way, you can have bi-directional links between builds and binaries.

We recommend to use stable versions of Maven 3 since other versions of Apache Maven including all versions of Maven 2 and Maven 1 have reached their end of life and are no longer supported by the project maintainers.

There are known issues regarding signing components and other aspects with a number of older Maven releases. A Maven build configuration can be set up to fulfill all the requirements in various ways and we will discuss all applicable details below. Note that while these instructions are considered best practice by Sonatype, opinions differ and you can find links to other documentation in the Additional Information section below.

Alternatively if you are using the Maven deploy plugin, which is the default behavior, you need to add a full distributionManagement section.

A minimal settings with the authentication is:. Note how the id element in the server element in settings. To get Javadoc and Source jar files generated, you have to configure the Javadoc and source Maven plugins. It relies on the gpg command being installed and the GPG credentials being available e.

In addition you can configure the gpg command in case it is different from gpg. This is a common scenario on some operating systems. In the example below you may need to use the last 8 characters of the signature keyid in hexadecimal format, you can find them using this command gpg --list-signatures --keyid-format 0xshort :.

If you need more help setting up and configuring GPG, please read our detailed instructions. To configure it simply add the plugin to your Maven pom.