Using nexus to determine the next version / build number.

By way of listing specific requirements and/or why we need the REST api, here's our use case.

When we build products, like everyone else using maven, we use a X.Y.Z numbering scheme.

Most people use the Jenkins build number for the Z when they are using CD. Or, they use the maven release plugin. But we do neither.

We view nexus as the 'single source of truth' about what versions are there. So what we do is to run a small script before each build that asks nexus what the current, latest version of the artifact is in nexus, then, we increment that number to do the next build.

This provides a number of advantages:

• we dont have a bunch of commits for each build [ maven release plugin]
• if the build fails, we dont skip version numbers-- we'll only consume a version number when we actually deploy
• multiple builds on multiple branches dont get screwed up

I should mention that the 2.X api was not ideal for us to accomplish this. We need to find the latest version of a particular GA coordinate. We found that neither none of these endpoints worked for us, which would have been a single call:

/service/local/artifact/maven /service/local/artifact/maven/content /service/local/artifact/maven/resolve

These supported a v=latest value, but would fail when the project was a pom-only project or when i didnt know the jar file i wanted, etc.

We ended up brute forcing it with this endpoint:

/service/local/lucene/search

with this endpoint, we can find all of the artifiacts for a given GA coordinate, and then find the latest. But the results of this endpoint didnt make it easy for us to do it at all:

• the data structure did not contain a timestamp,
• the endpoint doesnt allow explicitly ordering the results in any particular order

We ended up just listing all of the artifacts, and ASSUMING that they were listed in newest-to-oldest order, which happens to work.

In short, what would be great is if the NX3 rest api makes it easy to answer the question: 'what is the current, latest version of an artifact with a GA coordinate?

Artifact versioning and tagging

Each project is responsible for setting the versionName of the application or library. Build machine owns the versionCode (=BUILD#} for each project and increments it on a per build model. Build tags project on build success with PREFIX-{BRANCH}-{versionName}-{versionCode}-{BUILD#} Debug artifacts are posted to debug-snapshots with -SNAPSHOT Release artifacts are posted to release

Developer is responsible for the version name, but not the versionCode. When the version name is upped, the project is uploaded to nexus

Stage deployment involves promoting the