Continuous Integration (CI) Best Practices with SAP – Artifact Repository

The purpose of this guide is to enable you to do first steps in designing your own CI processes using components like Gerrit, Jenkins and Nexus. These setup instructions for these components serve educational purposes only and are not meant as reference setup for productive purposes; for productive use, refer to the official component documentation.

What we offer in this part is not more than a basic recipe to set up a minimum installation including only those components on Linux that we consider as absolutely necessary to run a CI/CD process for development with SAP. However, the setup best suited to your concrete requirements cannot be part of this document because it highly depends on your concrete local situation, the network setup, the overall landscape into which the CI/CD process will be embedded, and so on. Therefore, we will restrict ourselves here to showing only the principles and the core elements.

If you are interested in other examples of CI/CD processes with a focus on specific needs and local conditions, just follow the references we provide to the official documentation for the described components. For each component, we provide hints to how the described setup could be improved. This concerns the professional and reliable operation, for example, further security activities and operational refinements.

Note: This document is restricted to the description of component installation on Linux. For installation on Windows, we refer to the installation documentation on the web.

There are a lot of artifact repositories on the market that would fit our purposes. In this document, we will show how to integrate the open source version of Nexus into the CI process.

Nexus

Nexus is a repository manager, this means it is able to host many repositories. These may play different roles in the software development and release process (like snapshot and release repositories). Furthermore, it’s possible to have repositories supporting different technical formats.
This document refers to a Nexus 2 release.

Nexus
Nexus Downloads
Nexus Installation Guide

Prerequisites

• An appropriate Java JDK version for Nexus is installed on the machine.

Procedure

1. On the nexus machine, create an OS user nexus. Any other OS user that will run the Nexus application will work as well, but this is the name we will use in this document.

2. Create a Nexus installation directory owned by nexus. In this document, we will use /data/nexus, but any other directory that follows the respective conventions will work as well.
   Ensure that the file partition of the directory is big enough to store all the Nexus data including the binary artifacts uploaded to Nexus.

3. Log on as nexus.

4. Extract the downloaded Nexus installation archive into /data/nexus.

5. Go into the configuration directory (which should be something like /data/nexus/nexus-<release>/conf/) and open the file nexus.properties.
   In this document, we will keep the settings as they are, especially the default setting of the port Nexus is running with. But in your setup, you may choose whatever port is appropriate.

   application-port=8081
   

6. Switch to user root and create symbolic links as recommended by the Nexus installation guide:

   cd /usr/local
   ln -s /data/nexus/<the versioned nexus installation directory> nexus
   ln -s /data/nexus/sonatype-work sonatype-work
   

   If the directory sonatype-work does not yet exist, it will be created on startup of the Nexus application.

7. Switch to user nexus again and start Nexus.

   /usr/local/nexus/bin/nexus start
   

8. Open the URL http://<nexus host>:8081/nexus. You should now be able to access Nexus and you should see some default repositories already configured, especially two of them named Snapshots and Releases.

   

   Also, there is a user deployment that has access permissions for uploading artifacts. The default user for administrator access is admin/admin123.

   

9. To make Nexus productively runnable and secure, please follow the post-install checklist of the official documentation.

   Nexus Post-Install Checklist

The content of this document is for guidance purposes only. No warranty or guarantees are provided.

Next Steps

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