Repository Layouts

By Moshe Yalo

In the early days of component based software development, managing Maven repositories and meta-data was all that developers needed. As the usage of components grew in the software development ecosystem, the number of build tools, frameworks and repositories grew accordingly, and with that the variety of repository layouts. Developers need build tools to work naturally with the different repositories without having to “bend them” to conform to particular layouts. Developers also need to easily combine and chain repositories that use different layouts.

Artifactory solves this by giving you you full control over the layout used by each repository to identify module artifacts and descriptors. Once you can specify custom repository layouts, Artifactory can provide these smart module management facilities for any build technology:

  • Automatic cleanup of snapshot/integration versions
  • Deleting old versions
  • Conversions between remote and local layouts
  • Conversions between 2 local layouts when moving or copying artifacts from one repository to another
  • Converting resolution from a virtual repository to its underlying repositories

To support the most common build tools, Artifactory comes with a number of default layouts that require no additional configuration such as Maven 2 and 3, Ivy and Gradle.