如何获取artifactory来更新虚拟仓库的maven-metadata.xml？

Question

long time reader, first time asker...

I have a standalone network (no internet access). It has an artifactory server which has virtual libs-snapshot and libs-release repos. Under libs-snapshot , there are 4 local snapshot repos. The reason for this is that we get a dump of all the artifactory repos from somewhere else (non-connected), and import it to this network. But we have to modify a subset of the snapshot artifacts there. So we created another local snapshot repo, call it mine-snapshot-local (maven 2 repo, set as unique, max artifacts=1?), and added it to the top of the libs-snapshot virtual. In theory, this would allow us to modify the handful of artifacts we needed to, deploy to our own repo, and local developers would pick those up. But we would still have access to the 99% of other artifacts from the periodic dump from the other non-connected system. In addition, we can import the drops from the other network, which are concurrently being modified, on a wholesale basis without touching our standalone network repo ( mine-snapshot-local ). I guess we're "branching" artifactory repos...

I realize we could probably just deploy straight into one of the imported repos, but the next time we get a dump from the other network, all those custom modified artifacts would go away... so I'd really like to get this method to work if possible.

from my local eclipse, the maven plugin deploys artifacts explicitly, and without error, to the mine-snapshot-local repo. The issue I'm seeing is that the maven-metadata.xml for the virtual libs-snapshot is not being updated. The timestamp of that file is updated, and if I browse with a web browser to libs-snapshot/whatever_package, I can see my newly deployed artifacts, with newer timestamps than the existing snapshots. But the maven-metadata.xml file still contains pointers to the "older" snapshot.

maven-metadata.xml is successfully updated in the mine-snapshot-local repo, but it is as if artifactory is not merging all the metadata files together correctly for the virtual repo. Or, more likely, I have misconfigured something to cause it to ignore our top-layer local repo somehow (but why would the snapshot jar/pom still show up there?).

We are using artifactory 2.6.1 (and do not have the option to upgrade).

I've tried a number of things: setting the snapshot repos to unique, nonunique, deployer, limiting the number of snapshots, etc. None of it seems to make much of a difference.

The one thing I do see as possibly being an issue is the build number assigned to a snapshot. For example, in the imported repo, the artifact might have a timestamp that is a week old but a build number of 4355. In my new repo, when i deploy, i have a much newer timestamp, but the build number is 1 (or something much, much smaller than 4355).

Am I barking up the wrong tree by trying to have multiple local snapshot repos like this? It seems like this should be ok, but maybe not.

Answer 1

You are using a very (but very) old version of Artifactory and it could be that you are suffering from an issue that was long gone. The normal behavior should be that if you have 4 maven repositories and you updated/deployed new artifacts into one of those repositories, the Virtual repository should aggregate the metadata from all of the listed repositories.

Just to verify, you mentioned that you are deploying from Eclipse, are you referring to P2? If so just a side note, Artifactory will not calculate metadata for P2 artifacts.