Migrating maven artifact repositories - pom <url> value points to old repo

Question

Question:

When importing maven artifact repositories (either from other instances of Artifactory, or nexus, for example), many artifacts (and most parent) poms contain url tags which reference the old repository. These url tags are within the distributionManagement and repositories tags.

Do we need to go through a time consuming process of updating these URLs for every single artifact (and parent pom, where applicable)?

Further Information:

We are in the process of migrating some artifact repositories to a whole new environment. We have an old Artifactory instance and a Nexus instance from a separate project that we need to migrate into a single Artifactory instance in a new environment. We currently don't have access to run maven builds from the Nexus repo - we have only been given access to their filesystem to pull artifacts across.

The new Artifactory version is newer than the old one, so we used the following process:

1. system export excluding binaries
2. copy filestore directory across to new Artifactory server
3. imported the system export

For Nexus, we are rsyncing the filesystem for each repository across to the new Artifactory server, and using the 'Import Repository from Path' feature.

These imports have all finished successfully, and we can see all of the required artifacts in the new Artifactory instance.

We have successfully executed a maven build that pulled down dependencies imported from the old Artifactory instance, and this same build successfully published it's artifacts back to the new Artifactory instance as well.

Given our successful tests so far, we're not sure if we really need to update them, or if they will become a problem later for some reason (such as when we decommission the old Artifactory instance)

Answer 1

You're lucky to use Artifactory in your new environment :)

Artifactory will automatically remove any <repositories> references from your pom files, leaving the resolution rules to your settings.xml. All you need to do is generate a new settings.xml file from your new Artifactory and all the resolution will occur from it.

In order for it to work, please declare the old Artifactory and Nexus as remote repositories for the new Artifactory instance (don't use export/import). Once new Artifactory fetches artifact from old Artifactory or Nexus it removes the repositories declaration and stores the new, clean pom in the cache. After awhile when you sure everything is cached, you can decommission the old servers and declare those repositories as offline (optionally moving the artifacts to local repository).

Answer 2

Neither the repositories nor the distribitionManagement have an impact on your usage of the components and as such nothing needs to be done on the import.

The distributionManagement details where components are released to. Since the component are already released and in your repo server the content does not matter.

Having repositories as an element in your pom files is a very bad practice and should be avoided. However if you are using a repo manager and the appropriate settings using the mirrorOf setup in settings.xml none of the repositories will be taken into account, but instead your repo manager will be contacted as defined in your settings.xml.

As you can see you can just migrate the components and leave them alone. Modifying the poms of already released components is probably a bad practice, since it means that some clients will have one pom, while others will have a different one for the SAME artifact. This violates the idea of a non-changing release artifact and can cause problems.

And in terms of migration you can easily just migrate the repositories in Nexus and turn off the old servers (at least you could migrating to Nexus). That way you don't have to run a number of them in parallel and can quickly decommission, while at the same time being sure you have all your components in your new repo manager.