Is Nexus the right place to archive releases (jar-with-dependencies, WAR files, tar.gz, zip, etc.)?

Question

The way I understand it, Nexus is responsible for storing JAR files that reference other dependency JARs via their pom. And, in turn, the original JAR files can be used as dependencies as well.

However, should we store release artifacts in Nexus? These are files that will never be used as dependencies. They include jar-with-dependencies, WAR files, zip/tar.gz files, etc. What's the right place to store them?

A simple file system HTTP server like http://archive.apache.org/dist/ seems to be the right idea. But Nexus is indeed just a manager on top of that.

Answer 1

Nexus is definitely a good place to store these artifacts, since it has long evolved beyond a pure Maven repository server. It gives you a nice UI for download, security and much more.

If you are already using Nexus I would definitely not waste time with yet another server or infrastructure component to store these artifacts. Especially also if you are building your artifacts with Maven. Deployment comes pretty much for free then..