Gradle (Nexus Repository 2)

Gradle has a built in dependency management component that supports the Maven repository format. In order to configure a Gradle project to resolve dependencies declared in build.gradle file, a maven repository as shown in Minimal Gradle Setup has to be declared.

Minimal Gradle Setup

repositories {
    maven {
        url "http://localhost:8081/repository/maven-public/"
    }
}

These minimal settings allow Gradle to download the declared dependencies.

The above setup is specific to each project. Alternatively an init.gradle file placed e.g., in ~/.gradle can establish the repository as the source for dependencies in all projects. A simple implementation could look like:

allprojects {
  ext.RepoConfigurator = {
    maven {
      url = uri('http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/groups/public') }
  }
  buildscript.repositories RepoConfigurator
  repositories RepoConfigurator

Other setup could be an expansion of the following example allowing file system based repositories:

/**
 * init.gradle file for development using the Nexus Repository Manager as proxy repository
 *
 * @author Manfred Moser <manfred@simpligility.com>
 */

apply plugin:NexusRepositoryPlugin

class NexusRepositoryPlugin implements Plugin<Gradle> {

  final static String LOG_PREFIX = "init.gradle/NexusRepositoryPlugin:"

  final Closure NexusConfig = {
    maven {
      name = 'standard-nexus'
      url = 'http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/groups/public'
    }
    // if required you can add further repositories or groups here
    // and they will be left intact if the name starts with standard-
    // although it is better to just add those repositories in Nexus
    // and expose them via the public group
  }

  final Closure RepoHandler = {
    all { ArtifactRepository repo ->
      if (repo.name.toString().startsWith("standard-") ) {
         println "$LOG_PREFIX $repo.name at $repo.url activated as repository."
      } else {
        if (repo instanceof MavenArtifactRepository) {
          remove repo
          println "$LOG_PREFIX $repo.name at $repo.url removed."
        } else {
          println "$LOG_PREFIX $repo.name kept (not a Maven repository)."
        }
      }
    }
  }


  void apply(Gradle gradle) {
    // Override all project specified Maven repos with standard
    // defined in here
    gradle.allprojects{ project ->
      println "$LOG_PREFIX  Reconfiguring repositories."
      project.repositories RepoHandler
      project.buildscript.repositories RepoHandler

      project.repositories NexusConfig
      project.buildscript.repositories NexusConfig
    }
  }
}

Gradle init scripts can be much more powerful and customized and are explained with more examples in the official Gradle documentation.

To deploy build outputs to a repository with the uploadArchives task, user authentication can be declared in e.g., gradle.properties:

nexusUrl=http://localhost:8081/nexus
nexusUsername=admin
nexusPassword=admin123

and then used in the uploadArchives task with a mavenDeployer configuration from the Maven plugin:

uploadArchives {
  repositories {
    mavenDeployer {
      repository(
        url: "${nexusUrl}/content/repositories/releases") {
          authentication(userName: nexusUsername, password: nexusPassword)
      }
      snapshotRepository(
        url: "${nexusUrl}/content/repositories/snapshots") {
          authentication(userName: nexusUsername, password: nexusPassword)
      }
    }
  }
}

Full example projects can be found in the gradle folder of the documentation book examples. A full build of the simple-project, including downloading the declared dependencies and uploading the build output to the repository manager can be invoked with

cd gradle/simple-project
gradle upload