Best way to handle old snapshots in local repository?

Question

We have a Nexus local repository manager which handles all our internal projects (as well as mirroring outside repositories). For our internal projects, we only keep the most

Answer 1

We use a similar setup here. We have nexus automatically delete snapshots once the artifact is released (for some repositories). Then on our continuous server, we just have a cron job that once a day deletes the local repository folder. This works well for us.

Answer 2

On Linux, you can use this command:

find $HOME/.m2/repository/ \
   -name "*-SNAPSHOT" \
   -type d \
   -mtime +60 \
   -print \
   -prune \
   -exec rm -r "{}" \;

Explanation:

• Find anything named *-SNAPSHOT in the folder $HOME/.m2/repository/
• AND it must be a directory
• AND it must not have been modified in the last 60 days
• Print what you found. If you want to test the command, stop here
• The -exec will delete the folder, -prune tells find not to try to enter the folder afterwards.
• The -exec will delete the folder and files inside.

Answer 3

It could be a configuration problem with maven on your jenkins server.

maven can and should be configured to periodically look for updated snapshots by configuring the value of <updatePolicy> in <repository> section for <snapshots>.

<updatePolicy>daily</updatePolicy>

The choices are: always, daily (default), interval:X (where X is an integer in minutes) or never.

Also, if the version changes (from 1.1-SNAPSHOT to 1.2-SNAPSHOT), it is not clear how jenkins would successfully build with an older (1.1-SNAPSHOT) version.

Answer 4

First if you are using jenkins to build the best practice to have clean builds which means to use a local repository per build and not the global of the server. Furthermore it sounds that you don't use the release plugin to release your artifacts which automatically checks if a pom contains SNAPSHOTs and would fail if there are some. Furthermore it's possible to clean up the local repository via the maven-dependency-plugin. Based on my experience i have simply configured a task which deletes SNAPSHOTs which are older than a month...

Answer 5

You may try the Maven Repo Cleaner Jenkins Plugin