Programmer, Cyclist, Trivia Junkie.
16 March 2015
At @CertifyData, we run a bunch of different build systems including maven, gradle and grails. All of them produce artifacts that can be uploaded to a maven repository. In fact we use a maven repository to deliver content to our end users.
A somewhat boring part of our release process, was waiting for Jenkins to finish its build and then copy the link from nexus and send it out to our deployment team.
Given how long some projects take to build with all their dependencies, sometimes a developer pushing the release button would forget to send out the email. Also capturing the link and details for the email was a repetitive process prone to occasional errors.
So I came up with NexusMonitor. It is a groovy/gradle app which can monitor a Nexus repository’s RSS feed and send out emails based on a template.
Let’s get to a sample usage.
This describes what happens in our NexusMonitorConfig.groovy.
This is the groovy version of a properties file.
First you need to configure your email settings. This is self explanatory.
nexusmonitor {
from {
address = 'nexus@example.com'
personal = 'Nexus'
}
mail {
host = 'smtp.example.com'
port = 587
username = 'user@example.com'
password = 'password'
javaMailProperties = [
'mail.smtp.auth' : true,
'mail.smtp.starttls.enable' : false
]
}
}Next step, you need to configure feeds you’re interested in monitoring.
nexusmonitor.feeds = [
new Repository(
name: 'repo1',
feedUrl: 'http://domain/nexus/service/local/feeds/',
repoUrl: 'http://domain/nexus/content/repositories/public/',
recipients: ['a@example.com', 'b@example.com']
),
new Repository(
name: 'repo2',
feedUrl: 'http://otherdomain/nexus/service/local/feeds/',
repoUrl: 'http://otherdomain/nexus/content/repositories/public/',
recipients: ['c@example.com', 'd@example.com']
)
]Now you can run java -jar nexus-monitor.jar after you’ve downloaded the jar file from Central.
Every time this runs, it records the last run of each repo on a json called lastrun.json.
Running this manually can be boring, so I create a CRON job on the machine which runs this app.
* * * * * java -jar /root/nexus-monitor-1.0.jar >> /root/NexusMonitor.logIt runs every minute and scans the RSS feed of your repository.
We have an engineering team that is responsible for internally releasing applications, that will then be tested by our business analysts. You can think of that as a UAT phase. Once that is done, they want to make it available to our ops team which is responsible for installing these apps on customer machines.
When Engineering decides it’s time to do a release, we use git flow to get a new release onto the master branch, and Jenkins starts turning code into artifacts and putting them in the right repository.
Once a new artifact is available in these scanned repositories, the feed is automatically updated by Nexus. Now NexusMonitor kicks in and sees the new artifact and sends out an email to the business analysts and engineers confirming the availability of the new release and instructions to download the build.
We have some scripts prepared for them to run when they are happy with the build, and that downloads the artifacts from one repository and uploads them to another repository. This second repository is also scanned by NexusMonitor, and this sends out an email to the ops team notifying them what they can do with the build.
By default, there is a template embedded in the app called basic.html which gets used for emails.
However there is an attribute in our definition of repositories called name.
You could create a file called repo1.html and that would get picked up if your repository name in the config was repo1.
This is a good starting point for your email templates - basic.html.
Updates: Removed reference to snapshot in favor of running released code.