Uploading a standalone artifact to Nexus 3

This is one of those “I had to figure out how to do this today, so the next time I google this, I have a place to look” blog posts. Today, I had to upload a zip file as a build artifact to our Nexus 3 repository. The zip file had been generated by custom shell scripts that did not have a Maven, Ivy or Gradle projects to wrap them.

The obvious way to do this seemed like using the Nexus 3 REST API, invoked like this:

curl -v -u <username>:<password> \
   --upload-file artifact.zip \
   https://<nexus-server>/repository/maven-releases/com/example/artifact/1.0.0/artifact-1.0.0.zip

This works and the file is available in the repository. However, this method has the following shortcomings:

1. There will not be a POM file generated for this artifact.
2. The maven metadata associated with this artifact will not be updated.

Using Maven Deploy Plugin’s deploy file mojo in this situation will help us satisfy the above requirements. The mojo is capable of running in arbitrary directories without the need for a pom.xml to be present. However, it does expect you to specify authentication parameters in a settings.xml file. In my situation, I did not want to write credentials in a settings.xml, so I had to improvise.

This is what I ended up using and it works like a charm:

mvn deploy:deploy-file \
    -DgroupId=com.example \
    -DartifactId=artifact \
    -Dversion=1.0.0 \
    -Dpackaging=zip \
    -Dfile=artifact.zip \
    -DgeneratePom=true \
    -DupdateReleaseInfo=true \
    -Durl="https://${NEXUS_USERNAME}:${NEXUS_PASSWORD}@<nexus-server>/repository/maven-releases/"