Sonatype Nexus Repository 3.96.0 - 3.96.3 Release Notes

Sonatype Nexus Repository Pro now supports direct artifact downloads from Azure Blob Storage using short-lived SAS URLs. When enabled for an Azure blob store, Nexus Repository redirects clients directly to Azure Storage instead of proxying artifact data through the Nexus Repository server. This can reduce network and server resource usage while improving download throughput.

Azure Direct Download supports Shared Key, Managed Identity, and Environment Variable authentication. Nexus Repository also validates the configured Azure permissions when you enable direct downloads and automatically falls back to standard proxied delivery if a SAS URL cannot be generated, helping maintain reliable artifact access without requiring changes to client workflows.

As of release 3.96.0, Sonatype Nexus Repository no longer includes the legacy Nexus Repository 2-to-3 Upgrade Wizard. The wizard and its associated migration capability have been removed from the product, reducing the surface area of legacy functionality and simplifying Nexus Repository administration.

This change does not affect standard Nexus Repository 3 upgrades or the Nexus One UI Upgrade page, which continues to provide current version information and upgrade resources. For customers migrating from Nexus Repository 2, see the Nexus Repository 2 migration documentation for supported migration paths.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now provides OAuth2 and SSL Certificate management in the Nexus One UI, giving administrators a modern interface for configuring authentication and managing trusted certificates. The new experience provides improved form validation, certificate inspection, and integration with the Nexus Repository truststore, making it easier to configure and maintain secure connections to external identity providers.

The Nexus One UI also improves related security administration workflows, including preserving privilege searches when assigning multiple privileges and clearly displaying role types when editing existing roles. These enhancements provide a more consistent and efficient experience for managing authentication and security settings.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now provides an improved component details experience in the Nexus One UI, with faster version browsing and format-aware dependency information. The Versions tab now loads results incrementally, making it easier to work with components that have large numbers of versions while providing accurate version counts and ordering.

The Component Overview tab now displays dependency snippets that match the component's repository format, giving developers relevant commands and configuration examples they can copy directly into their projects. Component details and format information are also presented more consistently, with applicable registry links and other information shown only when relevant.

Sonatype Nexus Repository Community Edition now provides a more consistent and informative experience for monitoring usage across the Classic UI and Nexus One UI. Usage status and alerts are surfaced more clearly throughout the product, while the Usage Metrics dashboard provides administrators with a central view of component counts, request activity, and other usage information.

The enhanced experience makes it easier to understand current usage and take action when approaching Community Edition limits. Alerts now provide direct access to usage details, and metric cards include additional context to help administrators interpret their usage without leaving the dashboard.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now provides an improved audit logging experience with persistent audit event storage and a dedicated Audit Log page in the Nexus One UI. Administrators can browse, filter, and review significant configuration and security events directly in the interface, making it easier to monitor administrative activity and support compliance and troubleshooting workflows.

The enhanced audit experience includes configurable retention to help manage stored audit data, improved query performance, and more meaningful event records by excluding high-volume operational activity. Audit events also maintain accurate user attribution, including for asynchronous configuration changes, and administrators can view audit history for individual repositories directly from Repository Settings.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now provides a streamlined user management experience in the Nexus One UI. Selecting a user takes you directly to the appropriate view based on your permissions, while user editing combines profile details, role assignments, and an interactive security tree into a single page. The security tree updates as you change role assignments, helping you review effective privileges before saving.

The updated experience also simplifies common user administration tasks with a cleaner user list, safer user deletion controls, and save and cancel actions that activate only after changes are made. Together, these improvements make it easier to manage users and review their access with fewer steps.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now provides configuration pages for LDAP and Atlassian Crowd in the Nexus One UI. Administrators can configure and manage external authentication through the modern interface without switching to the Classic UI.

The new configuration experience provides improved validation, connection testing, error handling, accessibility, and overall usability. LDAP and Crowd administrators can more easily identify configuration errors, verify connections and user mappings, manage existing LDAP servers, and navigate configuration forms using keyboard and screen reader support. This enhancement brings the LDAP and Crowd administration experience in the Nexus One UI in line with the existing Classic UI functionality while providing a more consistent experience across Nexus Repository settings.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now provides improved chained proxy support for OCI, Swift, Pub, Ansible Galaxy, Hugging Face, Terraform, and Conda repositories. Organizations can more reliably use these formats in tiered, restricted, or air-gapped network environments where one Nexus Repository proxy repository retrieves content through another Nexus Repository instance before reaching the upstream source.

This enhancement improves authentication, request routing, and artifact resolution across the proxy chain. OCI and Swift repositories can authenticate with intermediate Nexus Repository instances, Pub repositories correctly construct upstream requests, Ansible Galaxy rewrites download URLs for downstream clients, Hugging Face supports pagination across chained proxies, and Terraform and Conda support preemptive authentication where applicable. These improvements help provide more reliable artifact retrieval while simplifying dependency management in isolated environments.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now reduces the amount of data transferred for npm metadata requests, helping improve package installation performance and reduce bandwidth and egress costs. When supported npm clients request abbreviated package metadata, Nexus Repository returns a smaller metadata representation instead of the full packument. Nexus Repository continues to use the full metadata internally and returns full metadata to clients that do not request the abbreviated format, preserving compatibility with existing workflows.

Nexus Repository can also gzip-compress npm JSON responses when clients indicate gzip support through the Accept-Encoding header. This compression applies specifically to eligible npm responses, including large packuments, without enabling compression globally for other repository formats. Together, abbreviated metadata and gzip compression can substantially reduce npm response sizes while maintaining compatibility with npm, Yarn, and pnpm clients and ensuring caches and CDNs distinguish between response variants correctly.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now supports the npm abbreviated packument format, allowing npm clients to receive only the package metadata required for installation. This reduces the amount of metadata transferred during npm install operations, with payload sizes reduced by up to 89% for packages with large numbers of published versions.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now limits the size of name and description metadata stored from Maven POM files to 10,000 characters. Values that exceed this limit are truncated during deployment, helping protect repository metadata from excessively large values and ensuring that stored component information remains available for browsing and retrieval.

Sonatype Nexus Repository now consistently enforces the nexus.scripts.allowCreation setting across all script operations.

This enhancement provides clearer and more predictable administrative control over scripting, while maintaining the security best practice of keeping scripting disabled when it is not required. To run existing scripts, temporarily enable scripting through nexus.properties and restart Nexus Repository.

Nexus Repository 3.96.0 adds an administrator notification when required base telemetry cannot be delivered. This notification does not affect repository operation or upgrade behavior. If you see the notification, confirm that your server can reach the Sonatype telemetry service, then run the Upload Retry task. If the issue continues, contact Sonatype Support.

For details about the anonymous, non-sensitive information collected by Nexus Repository, see the Nexus Repository Telemetry help documentation.