Title: Deploying files with maven-deploy-plugin
Date: 2019-02-11
Lang: en

We recently had an outage of our Nexus instance at work. The file system went corrupt, nexus would not start up properly complaining about a corrupted Orient DB.

The blob store was largely left intact. In hindsight I should have tried to rebuild the OrientDB from the blob store using the _Repair - Reconcile component database from blob store_ task. I found out too late while I already had recovered half of our releases from my local maven repository.

I went down the more difficult route of re-uploading artifacts from my local Maven repo into Nexus. While you can upload single artifacts through Nexus' web GUI this approach did not scale. Instead, I used the `maven-deploy-plugin` to upload. Each of our artifacts comes with source accompanied, most expose also tests and test sources. So basically an artifact consists of these files:

* my-lib-1.0.jar
* my-lib-1.0.pom
* my-lib-1.0-sources.jar
* my-lib-1.0-tests.jar
* my-lib-1.0-test-sources.jar

All these files need to be uploaded together at once. It took me a little while to understand how to build the commandline for the deploy plugin to accomplish this. 

The `file` parameter takes the main jar. The `pomFile` paramenter taks the pom file. That's easy. The other files have to be specified using a more convoluted format. Each file name has to specify its classifier and its type, appended to the separate `classifiers` and `types` lists. Finally the `files` list must specify the full file names. A look at the example will make more sense:

	:::shell
	mvn deploy:deploy-file \
		-Dmaven.repo.local=/tmp/maven-repo \
        -Durl=http://nexus.local/repository/releases \
        -DrepositoryId=releases \
        -Dfile=my-lib-1.0.jar \
        -DpomFile=my-lib-1.0.pom \
        -Dclassifiers=sources,tests,test-sources \
        -Dtypes=jar,jar,jar \
        -Dfiles=my-lib-1.0-sources.jar,mylib-1.0-tests.jar,my-lib-1.0-test-sources.jar

You may have noticed that I'm specifying a separate local repository to use during the upload. This is because Maven refuses to upload artifacts from the repo it's currently operating on. Simply using a throw-away temporary local repo helps minimize the amount of fiddling around with local files.