VCS Repositories
Artifactory and…what? Source files? Yes, Artifactory manages sources as binary components. Read how.
You normally connect Artifactory with binary components, just like you connect Version Control Systems with source files. But you can connect Artifactory with source files too. Artifactory exposes an API that lets you query popular VCS systems in a uniform way, and download whole tags or branches as binaries instead of a series of source files. This capability is what allows Artifactory to support technologies such as Bower, PHP, Rails, node.js, Ruby and more that are deployed using pure source files.
Consuming source files as binaries through Artifactory presents several benefits:
Simplified scripts through uniform access to different version control systems
Artifactory provides access to different version control systems* through a uniform API. This simplifies your build scripts since you don’t need to modify them according to the VCS you are using. Using Artifactory’s API, a single script will work for all supported version control systems.
Stable and reliable access to source code
Your source code repositories are critical resources in your development efforts. Any interference in connecting to them can result in significant delays whether a developer is trying check out the latest tag, or commit a new feature.
Artifactory caches tags and branches files locally in remote repositories. This means that even if the network or your version control system is down, you still have access to your source files.
Security
Artifactory offers security measures that are much more comprehensive than those provided by version control systems. By assigning different sets of permissions to users and groups you have fine-grained control over who can access your source files. You can also use Artifactory’s integration with LDAP, Active Directory, SAML, Crowd and others to control access to your servers
Smart Search for tags or branches
Artifactory provides you with flexible search capabilities to help you find any tag or branch stored in your system. Built-in search APIs let you search for specific files within archives, find tags by date, or apply pattern matching to the tag name and more. And by assigning properties to your tags and branches, you can search on these properties to implement virtually any set of rules relevant to your workflow.
* Currently only Git is supported. More version control systems will be supported soon
