Learn to Set Up An Internal Private Repository For An Organization

We have set up an internal Maven Repository for our organisation so that the developers are not wasting time in searching and downloading the required project libraries. This also allows us to have a single company wide repository for project artifacts. The setup steps are not too much complicated but we didn't run into several issues while setup the local repository server (artifactory), for the first time.

When you're using maven at your company, you almost always want to setup local maven repository as relying on ibiblio for nightly / production builds is not a great idea and it takes time to download the library files if your development team is big. When setting up a local repository you don't want to setup the entire ibiblio repository locally as it is huge and has more libraries than you'll ever be using for your project. Maven-repository (in our case maven artifactory) is a repository server, which acts as your internal maven repository and downloads jars from ibiblio or other public maven repositories on demand and store it for further use in the project builds. And all this is transparent to the developer running a maven build.

The other neat thing about local maven-repository is that it allows you to neatly separate and organize jars that might not be available on ibiblio i.e. the 3rd-party artifacts (some company specific shared library or a commercial library).

Software requirements to set up the maven repository:

Artifactory: Download and install the artifactory from the site http://www.jfrog.org/sites/artifactory/latest/. Artifactory comes with the application that can be installed into Tomcat.
JDK 1.6: Get the information for downloading and installation from the site http://www.jfrog.org/sites /artifactory/latest/install .html.
Tomcat 6.0

A Quick glance to the steps how we set up our local maven repository :

Download the appropriate Artifactory.zip file. You can get it from http://www.jfrog.org/sites/artifactory/latest/. Download and unzip the file in your directory of choice. We have downloaded artifactory-1.2.1.zip at our end.

Lets take the Installation directory as D:\artifactory-1.2.2\artifactory-1.2.2, Extract the artifactory-1.2.1.zip into the <artifactory-install-directory> directory.

Create repository configuration file artifactory.config.xml into <artifactory-install-directory>/etc/ directory and paste the following content in the artifactory.config.xml file:

<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns="http://artifactory.jfrog.org/xsd/1.0.0"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://artifactory.jfrog.org/xsd/1.0.0
http://www.jfrog.org/xsd/artifactory-v1_0_0.xsd">


<localRepositories>

<localRepository>
<key>private-internal-repository</key>
<description>Private internal repository</description>
<handleReleases>true</handleReleases>
<handleSnapshots>true</handleSnapshots>
</localRepository>

<localRepository>
<key>3rd-party</key>
<description>3rd party jars added manually</description>
<handleReleases>true</handleReleases>
<handleSnapshots>false</handleSnapshots>
</localRepository>

</localRepositories>

<remoteRepositories>

<remoteRepository>
<key>ibiblio</key>
<handleReleases>true</handleReleases>
<handleSnapshots>false</handleSnapshots>
<excludesPattern>org/artifactory/**,org/jfrog/**</excludesPattern>
<url>http://repo1.maven.org/maven2</url>
<proxyRef>proxy1</proxyRef>
</remoteRepository>

<remoteRepository>
<key>ibiblio.org</key>
<description>ibiblio.org</description>
<handleReleases>true</handleReleases>
<handleSnapshots>false</handleSnapshots>
<excludesPattern>org/artifactory/**</excludesPattern>
<url>http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2</url>
<proxyRef>proxy1</proxyRef>
</remoteRepository>

<remoteRepository>
<key>java.net</key>
<description>java.net</description>
<handleReleases>true</handleReleases>
<handleSnapshots>false</handleSnapshots>
<excludesPattern>org/artifactory/**,org/jfrog/**</excludesPattern>
<url>http://download.java.net/maven/2</url>
<proxyRef>proxy1</proxyRef>
</remoteRepository>

</remoteRepositories>

<proxies>
<proxy>
<key>proxy1</key>
<host>192.168.10.80</host>
<port>9090</port>
<username></username>
<password></password>
<domain>192.168.10.80</domain>
</proxy>
</proxies>
</config>

At our end we are using squid proxy server to connect with the internet. Our artifactory repository server will connect to internet through squid proxy server running on the machine 192.168.10.80 at port 9090. You can also use artifactory server without proxy. We have made two local and three remote repositories.

Download and install tomcat 6.0 on your machine.

Copy artifactor.war from artifactory-1.2.1\webapps to the webapps folder of your installed tomcat directory.

Specify the local artifactory installation folder to the tomcat environment.
Go to Start-->Programs --> Apache Tomcat 6.0--> Configure Tomcat and specify the installation folder to the Java Options.
-Dartifactory.home=<artifactory-install-directory>

Now start the tomcat and configure your clients to use maven artifactory repository.

To access the admin control panel type http://<server>:<port>/artifactory and login as User: admin and Password: password.