Lóránd Somogyi

As you might know we use Maven extensively. We have a corporate Maven Repository served by JFrog’s Artifactory. We have more than 30000 artifacts in our repository, – about 35GB of backup.

We try to keep up-to-date with new Artifactory releases. Unfortunately some times upgrade is not that smooth, so we need a backup and a drop-in service in case of failure.

As most of our artifacts are just old releases, we decided to create a secondary service, which acts as a drop-in service in case Artifactory is down. The idea is simple, just create a repo1.maven.org like service, with simple HTTP. Each time upgrade is to take place, copy all the new data to that repository and switch the service to point to it. – This works in case of failure too, just copy the backup to a simple “repository”.

To create the simple repository we took our Artifactory backup, removed the Artifactory specific meta-data and copied to a directory and configured an Apache HTTPD to serve it. Unfortunately the Artifactory backup contains no maven-metadat.xml, which plays key role in resolving versions. I was sure there is a maven-metadata.xml generator somewhere on the Net. But there were none! We needed it badly, so I created one. It is a simple Perl script that runs under Linux (uses shell commands extensively). It takes care of releases, but ignores SNAPSHOTs. Afterwards I realized that we need to produce md5 and sha1 checksums to, so I’ve created another script.

I thought it would be nice to share the scripts, so I’ve created a project on Google Code under maven-scripts name.

To create maven-metadata.xml:

• cd to root of the Maven Repository folder, in my case: cd /data/mvnrepo/releases-backup
• execute the script: /path/to/script/mvn-metadata-gen.pl

You will see 2 lines for each maven-metadata.xml generated: one for the metadata, the other for sha1.

If you need md5 and sha1 sums for POMs and JARs:

• cd to root of the Maven Repository folder, in my case: cd /data/mvnrepo/releases-backup
• execute the script: /path/to/script/mvn-sha1md5.pl

(Well, this could be Bash script too…)

Script could be downloaded at download page.

Please report any problem, bug, issue at projects issues page.

Lift the weight

If you have a lots of artifacts as we have, you could lift the weight a bit from your Maven Repository creating a repository as described above and setting it as a mirrored repository.

We do that, and now:

• Artifactory eats up less Memory, CPU and disk space
• Backup is much smaller
• Maintenance is easier
• Upgrades are less painful