With the Unzip Repository Nexus Plugin, you can use Nexus for exchanging binary artifacts between Tycho builds.
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Tycho project A publishes its artifacts like a normal Maven project: The project is built with
mvn clean deploy, which uploads the project’s artifacts into your deploy Maven repository on the Nexus. The only special requirement is that the project builds a p2 repository. The recommended way to do this is aneclipse-repositorymodule, but a “deployable feature” should also work in most cases. -
On your Nexus, you only need the following one-time configuration: For the deploy Maven repository (or a “Repository Group” which includes that repository), you need to add a virtual repository of type “Unzip Repository”. This virtual repository shows zip artifacts from the deploy repository in unpacked form.
Example: If the p2 repository zip of project A is in the deploy Maven repository at
http://nexus.corp/nexus/repositories/build.milestones/corp/example/project-a/project-a-repo/1.0.0/project-a-repo-1.0.0.zip, it will be available in standard p2 repository format in the Unzip Repository athttp://nexus.corp/nexus/repositories/build.milestones.unzip/corp/example/project-a/project-a-repo/1.0.0/project-a-repo-1.0.0.zip-unzip/. -
Tycho project B can reference the artifacts from project A by adding the latter URL to its target platform, e.g. in a target definition file.
In the above example, project B references a release version of project A. The same approach also works for snapshots because the Unzip Repository has support for “symbolic” versions, like 1.1.0-SNAPSHOT for the last deployed 1.1.0-SNAPSHOT or even just SNAPSHOT for the overall highest version. Using these symbolic versions, Project B can then, for example in its own CI build, reference the CI build results project A by adding the resulting (stable!) p2 repository URLs in its target platform.
Disclaimer: The Unzip Repository Nexus Plugin is part of the Tycho project, of which I’m a committer.