Sonatype Nexus is a repository for build artifacts, which is particularly handy if you have a Maven project. Once you have your Maven project configured, every time you run mvn deploy Maven will do a bit of building and then upload the resulting artifacts (.jar, .war, …) to the repository. If you browse Nexus you will then be able to find those artifacts with a unique name and download them.

This is all great, but if your project is running on a snapshot version, then every time you deploy to Nexus, the artifact file name will be appended with date and an ever-incrementing number. For my purposes, I wanted to be able to go on to a Linux test server where I have Apache Tomcat installed and grab the latest .war file. Maybe I need to relax more, but I was getting a bit irritated with having to manually find the snapshot in Nexus, copy the link and then fire off a curl -O -L http://... command every time I updated the project.

Continue reading “Getting the latest snapshot from Sonatype Nexus” →