appengine-maven-repository

Private Maven repositories hosted on Google App-Engine, backed by Google Cloud Storage, supporting HTTP Basic authentication and minimalistic user access control deployed in less than 5 minutes.

• Why ?
• Installation
  • Prerequisites
  • Configuration
  • Deployment
• Artifacts
• Limitations
• License

Why ?

Private Maven repositories shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg, nor requires you to become a Linux Sys-Admin to setup, and should ideally be zero maintenance and cost nothing.

Thanks to Google App-Engine's free quotas, you'll benefits (for free):

• 5GB of storage
• 1GB of daily incoming bandwidth
• 1GB of daily outgoing bandwidth
• 20,000+ storage ops per day

Moreover, no credit card is required to benefit of those free quotas!

Installation

Prerequisites

First of all, you'll need to go to your Google Cloud console and create a new project:

As soon as your project is created, a default Google Cloud storage bucket has been automatically created for you which provides the first 5GB of storage for free.

Configuration

Clone (or download) the source code:

$ git clone https://github.com/renaudcerrato/appengine-maven-repository.git

Edit WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml, and replace the default application ID with your own:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0">
    <application>my-maven-repo</application>
    ...

Finally, update WEB-INF/users.txt to declare users, passwords and permissions:

# That file declares your users - using basic authentication.
# Minimalistic access control is provided through the following permissions: write, read, or list.
# Syntax is:
# <username>:<password>:<permission>

admin:l33t:write
john:j123:read
donald:coolpw:read
guest:guest:list

The list permission allows to list the content of your repository (when pointing your browser to your repository URL), but prohibits downloads. The write permission implies read, which itself implies list.

Deployment

Once you're ready to go live, just push the application to Google App-Engine:

$ cd appengine-maven-repository
$ ./gradlew appengineUpdate

Be aware that the very first time the commands above will run, a browser page will be launched asking you to authorize the Gradle App-Engine plugin to access your Google Cloud account. Just copy the returned authorization code, paste it into your console and press [Enter].

And voilà! Your private Maven repository can be accessed at the following address:

https://<yourappid>.appspot.com

Artifacts

There's absolutely no extra steps required to fetch and/or deploy Maven artifacts to your repository: simply use your favorite Maven tools as you're used to do.

Ensure you do NOT commit credentials with your code. With Gradle, you can achieve this by amending the following example using the approach specified here of moving your creds to ~/.gradle/gradle.properties and only referring to the variable names within your build.

An example deploying artifacts using the maven plugin for Gradle:

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'maven'

...

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
        mavenDeployer {
            repository(url: "https://<yourappid>.appspot.com") {
                authentication(userName: "admin", password: "password")
            }
            pom.version = "1.0-SNAPSHOT"
            pom.artifactId = "test"
            pom.groupId = "com.example"
        }
    }
}

Using the above, deploying artifacts to your repository is as simple as:

$ ./gradlew upload

Accessing password protected Maven repositories using Gradle only requires you to specify the credentials closure:

repositories {
    ...
    maven {
        credentials {
            username 'user'
            password 'password'
        }
        url "https://<yourappid>.appspot.com"
    }
}

Limitations

Google App-Engine HTTP requests are limited to 32MB - and thus, any artifacts above that limit can't be hosted.

License

Copyright 2016 Cerrato Renaud

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.