Installing Nexus OSS on Centos 7

03 May 2017

On my new role, I have found out that we are publishing jars to a private repository. This is to speed up build by telling Maven to get from our private repository first before going out to public. To learn more about Nexus, I'm installing it on my personal laptop running CentOS 7.

Download and extract nexus

$ wget http://download.sonatype.com/nexus/3/latest-unix.tar.gz
$ sudo tar xvf latest-unix.tar.gz -C /opt
$ sudo ln -s /opt/nexus-3.3.1-01/ /opt/nexus

Setup nexus user

$ sudo adduser nexus
$ sudo chown -R nexus:nexus /opt/nexus

Running as nexus user

$ sudo vim /opt/nexus/bin/nexus.rc

run_as_user="nexus"   
:wq

You can tweak VM options through /opt/nexus/bin/nexus.vmoptions

Running nexus as Linux service

$ sudo ln -s /opt/nexus/bin/nexus /etc/init.d/nexus
$ sudo systemctl enable nexus
nexus.service is not a native service, redirecting to /sbin/chkconfig.
Executing /sbin/chkconfig nexus on

Starting nexus

$ sudo systemctl start nexus
fan noise...

To check, point your browser to http://localhost:8081. Default username is admin with password admin123.

Running behind reverse proxy

$ vim /opt/sonatype-work/nexus3/etc/nexus.properties
nexus-context-path=/nexus
:wq

Add nexus.conf to existing /etc/httpd/conf.d. Here's what the file should contain.

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
    ServerName centos.dev
    ServerAdmin admin@centos.dev
    ProxyPass /nexus http://localhost:8081/nexus
    ProxyPassReverse /nexus http://localhost:8081/nexus
    ErrorLog /var/log/nexus/error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/nexus/access.log common
</VirtualHost>

Make the log folder as define on ErrorLog and CustomLog directives then test the configuration.

$ sudo mkdir /var/log/nexus
$ apachectl configtest
Syntax OK
$ sudo systemctl httpd restart

dhon.manalo