Fronting Oracle Maven Repository with Artifactory

The JFrog team announced this week the release of Artifactory 3.5.1, which is a minor update that now works with the Oracle Maven Repository.

http://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/Artifactory+3.5.1

I spent a little while yesterday having a look at it, working through the configuration of a remote repository and testing it with a maven project to see how it worked.

Once I'd downloaded it and started it up -- much love for simple and obvious bin/*.sh scripts -- it was a very simple two step process:

1. Since we live behind a firewall first add a proxy configuration to point at our proxy server.

2. Add a new remote repository and pointed it at the Oracle Maven Repository, specifying its URL and using my OTN credentials as username and password.

The Artifactory 3.5.1 documentation stated that the Advanced Settings >  Lenient host authentication and Enable cookie management options must be checked when accessing the Oracle Maven Repository.

The Test button is handy to verify the server settings have been entered correctly.

3. Use the Home tab > Client Settings > Maven Settings link to generate and save a settings.xml file that uses the artifactory server.

With the repository running, configured and the settings.xml saved, its then possible to try it out with an existing maven project such as https://github.com/buttso/weblogic-with-arquillian.

I also nuked my local repository to force/verify that the dependencies were fetched through the specified Artifactory server.

$ rm -fr ~/.m2/repository/com/oracle
$ mvn -s artifactory-settings.xml test

Viewing the output of the mvn process and the running Artifactory server you can see that maven is downloading dependencies from http://localhost:8081/artifactory and correspondingly Artifactory is downloading the requested artifact from https://maven.oracle.com.

Once the maven process has completed and all the requested artifacts downloaded, Artifactory will have cached them locally for future use.
 
Using the Search functionality of the Artifactory Web UI you can search for weblogic artifacts.

Using the Repository Browser functionality of the Artifactory Web UI you can view and navigate around the contents of the remote Oracle Maven Repository.

Nice JFrog > Artifactory team - thanks for the quick support of our repository.

One further thing I'd look at doing is enabling the Configure Passwords Encryption option in the Security settings to encrypt your OTN password, so that it's not stored in cleartext in the etc/artifactory.config.latest.xml file.

Oracle Maven Repository - Viewing Contents in Eclipse

With the Oracle Maven Repository now accessible one way to have explore its contents is to use the Maven Repositories viewer feature available in most development tools. I've seen the repository contents displayed easily in NetBeans so I decided to take a look at what it looks like in Eclipse as well.

I had to make a few minor setting changes to get it to work so decided to document them here.  If you've gotten it to work with less setting changes, let me know!

As initial setup, I configured my local maven environment to support access to the Oracle Maven Repository.  This is documented here https://maven.oracle.com/doc.html.  I also installed maven-3.2.5 that includes the updated Wagon module that supports authentication.

Next I downloaded and used the new network installer that the Oracle Eclipse team has published on OTN to install the latest version of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse.

This network installer lets developers select the version of Eclipse to install and the set of Oracle extensions --  Weblogic, GlassFish and other stuff -- to add in to it.

 Once Eclipse is installed, you can add the Maven Repository viewer by selecting   Window > Show View > Other > Maven Repositories from the Eclipse toolbar.

I also added a Console > Maven viewer to see what was happening under the covers and arranged them so they were visible at the same time:

With the Maven views ready to go, expand the Global Repositories node. This will show Maven Central (any other repositories you may have configured) and the Oracle Maven Repository if you have configured it correctly in the settings.xml file.

The initial state of the Oracle Maven Repository doesn't show any contents indicating that its index hasn't been downloaded to display.

Right mouse clicking on it and selecting the Rebuild Index option causes an error to be shown in the console output indicating that the index could not be accessed.

To get it to work, I made the following changes to my environment.  

Configure Eclipse to Use Maven 3.2.5

Using the Eclipse > Preferences > Maven > Installation dialog, configure Eclipse to use Maven 3.2.5.  This is preferred version of Maven to use to access the Oracle Maven Repository since it automatically includes the necessary version of the Wagon HTTP module that supports the required authentication configuration and request flow.

Configure Proxy Settings in Maven Settings File

** If you don't need a proxy to access the Internet then step won't be needed **
 
If you sit behind a firewall and need to use a proxy server to access public repositories then you need to configure a proxy setting inside the maven settings file.

Interestingly for command line maven use and NetBeans a single proxy configuration in settings.xml was enough to allow the Oracle Maven Repository to be successfully accesses and its index and artifacts used.

However with Eclipse, this setting alone didn't allow the Oracle Maven Repository to be accessed.  Looking at the repository URL for the Oracle Maven Repository you can see ity's HTTPS based -- https://maven.oracle.com and it appears for Eclipse that a specific HTTPS based proxy setting is required for Eclipse to access HTTPS based repositories.

Rebuild Index Success

With the settings in place, the Rebuild Index operation succeeds and the contents of the Oracle Maven Repository are displayed in the repository viewer.