Day 74: Nexus Repository Setup

In modern DevOps, artifact management is crucial. Today, I worked on setting up Nexus Repository and integrated it into my Jenkins Pipeline to store versioned build artifacts.

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📌 Why Nexus Repository?

Nexus is a universal artifact repository manager. It allows us to:
✅ Store build artifacts (JAR, WAR, Docker images).
✅ Version control for builds.
✅ Share artifacts across environments (QA → Staging → Prod).
✅ Secure access using credentials.

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⚙️ Jenkins Pipeline with Nexus Integration

Here’s the pipeline I used for nexus setup:

pipeline {
    agent any
    tools {
        maven "MAVEN3"
        jdk "OracleJDK8"
    }
    stages{
       stage("UploadArtifact"){
            steps{
                nexusArtifactUploader(
                  nexusVersion: 'nexus3',
                  protocol: 'http',
                  nexusUrl: '172.31.18.28:8081',
                  groupId: 'QA',
                  version: "${env.BUILD_ID}-${env.BUILD_TIMESTAMP}",
                  repository: 'vprofile-repo',
                  credentialsId: 'nexuslogin',
                  artifacts: [
                    [artifactId: 'vproapp',
                     classifier: '',
                     file: 'target/vprofile-v2.war',
                     type: 'war']
                  ]
                )
            }
        }
    }
}

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🛠️ Breakdown of Nexus Upload Stage

• nexusArtifactUploader → Jenkins plugin to push artifacts to Nexus.

• nexusVersion → Specifies Nexus 3.

• credentialsId → Jenkins credentials for authentication.

• groupId → Logical group for your artifacts (QA in this case).

• version → Uses Jenkins build ID + timestamp for versioning.

• repository → Nexus repo name (vprofile-repo).

• artifacts → WAR file to upload.

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🚀 Why This Matters?

• Every successful build gets uploaded to Nexus.

• Builds are versioned automatically using Jenkins metadata.

• QA/Dev teams can fetch exact builds for testing or deployment.

• Prevents "works on my machine" issues by having one source of truth for artifacts.