Goals

Since migration of Sonatype Nexus 3.71.0, lots of things have changed for free version (Java 17 and H2).

In my company, we used Groovy clean-up script to purge old Maven releases with internal “org.sonatype.nexus.repository.storage.StorageFacet” and “org.sonatype.nexus.repository.storage.Query”. With removal of OrientDB, we can not do it anymore. Also, script are deprecated (and disabled by default) and it is not reliable to use internal classes.

Nexus contains a “retain select versions” feature, but for pro version only. So we decided to create a shell script that use public APIs of Nexus.

Features

This script has these features:

• clean-up Sonatype Nexus repositories (used for Maven but it will work for other types);
• white list by groups or components;
• keep X latest versions of each component;
• show biggest items by size;
• show large components.

Dependencies

Only few things:

• a shell (tested with bash-4.2 and zsh-5.8);
• jq (tested with jq-1.6);
• curl (tested with curl-7.29);
• grep (tested with grep-2.20);
• sed (tested with sed-4.2);
• sort (tested with coreutils-8.22, needs at least --sort-version).

Usage

Simply download purge_nexus.sh and give it execute rights chmod +x purge_nexus.sh.

Usage: ./purge_nexus.sh [OPTION]

Options:

• -s is simulation mode (only print delete commands);
• -v is verbose mode.

Variables (change it before use it):

Name	Format	Default values	Comments
AUTHENTIFICATION	USER:PASSWORD	No value	Dedicated user on Nexus with roles nx-repository-view-maven2-*-browse and nx-repository-view-maven2-*-delete (“*” can be a single repository depending on your need)
BASE_URL	http(s)://FQDN	http://127.0.0.1:8080	Base URL only (do not include /service/rest/vX/)
COMPOSANTS_EXCLUS	group1.component1|group2.component2|…|groupN.componentN	Empty	Example: com.company.application1|com.company.application2
GROUPES_EXCLUS	group1|group2|…|groupN	Empty	Example: com.company.subgroup1|com.company.subgroup2
GARDER_X_VERSIONS	Integer greater than 0	3	This script will keep this number of versions