Ajax + Maven + S3 = A lightweight maven repository browser that never goes down.
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| Heavyweight interfaces sometimes occlude the simple, platform neutral, static directory structure that made maven famous to begin with. If your server goes down, your jars are unavailable. S3 solves this problem by providing serverless, http accessible storage. Adding Javascript + ajax into the mix means you can have dynamic content hosted through s3 with zero administration. |
Problem: You have a public maven repository somewhere (i.e. in the cloud) – but you want to be able to browse it in a user freindly way.
Solution 1: Use a full blown repo manager archiva/artifactory/nexus to host it.
There are use cases for this… i.e., you are a huge company with 100s of developers and you need a scalable interface to host lots of jar artifacts with many versions in a secure manner, and you also need to provide different users different permissions to maintain different repositories, etc… But for a simple maven repo, some might say that a heavy weight repo manager creates a new problem: You are maintaining a server just to host a couple of jar files. The snazzy UI to your jar files is nice – but is it really necessary? Do you really need “roles” and hosted md5 comparisons just to share a few binaries? Probably not.
Now, Admittedly, for big organizations with security issues, etc, a private archiva server is a nice solution…. but probably isnt required for smaller projects which need a simple landing page for their maven artifacts for end users to consume.
Solution 2: Put the maven repo in S3 and use JQueries snazzy XML parser to host a dynamic, HTML5+jquery/javascript front-end. Here’s how:
1) Either use an s3 publisher in your “mvn deploy” invocations, or else, just scp your maven repository into s3://yourbucket/maven/
2) Now, you can look into http://<your_bucket>.s3.amazonaws.com/maven/repositories/internal/<your_repo_path>/maven-metadata.xml”, and you will see that there is a nice layout of all versions of your Jar. For example: http://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/apache/pig/pigsmoke/maven-metadata.xml contains several version tags.
3) Save the code below to s3://<your_bucket>/maven/index.html
<html>
<head>
<title>GlusterFS-Hadoop Releases</title>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<p> Releases </p>
<div id="releases">
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#msgid").html("--");
});
function UrlExists(url, cb){
jQuery.ajax({
url: url,
dataType: 'text',
type: 'GET',
complete: function(xhr){
if(typeof cb === 'function')
cb.apply(this, [xhr.status]);
}
});
}
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#releases").append("<ul></ul>");
$.ajax({
type: "GET",
url: " http://rhbd.s3.amazonaws.com/<PATH_TO_YOUR_REPO>/maven-metadata.xml",
dataType: "xml",
success: function(xml){
$(xml).find('metadata').each(function(){
var versioning = $(this).find('versioning').text();
var versions = $(this).find('versions').text();
$.each(versions.split("\n"),
function(index,value ) {
var jarlink = "http://<YOUR_BUCKET_NAME>.s3.amazonaws.com/maven/<PATH_TO_YOUR_REPO>/VERSION/<YOUR_ARTIFACT_NAME>-VERSION.jar"
var regex = new RegExp('VERSION', 'g');
var jarversion = jarlink.replace(regex,value.trim());
//$("<li></li>").html(jarversion).appendTo("#releases ul");
$("<li></li>").html("<a href=\""+jarversion+"\">"+value+"</a>").appendTo("#releases ul");
}
);
});
},
error: function() {
alert("An error occurred while processing XML file ");
}
});
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
4) Now, browsing to http://<YOUR_BUCKET>.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html , You will see a nice list of links to your maven jars. This is super easy to modify and maintain, and if using a object store like s3, you can gaurantee that your users will always have access to your artifacts. Moral of the story: You can easily modify your landing page to your maven jars without using a heavy weight repo manager.
Checkout our glustersf-hadoop landing page http://rhbd.s3.amazonaws.com/maven/index.html, as an example of how this works… as long as you continue to use “mvn deploy:deploy” to update your repo, the HTML page will always serve the latest contents, because the maven-metadata.xml page will be automatically updated in the publishing process.