Cleaning up old releases in Nexus 2 and 3

In Nexus 2 there is the task "remove releases from repository", where you can further refine the scope by specifying a "repository target" (=a filter).... problem is, the only option you have is the number of the most recent versions to retain.... there is no way to specify "delete all versions older than 2 years, but in any case keep the last 10".

I have written this Spring Boot utility https://github.com/vernetto/nexusclean to generate curl commands to delete artifacts based on multiple selection criteria. But it doesn't handle parent pom, which is a limitation.

Also, be aware that the curl command to delete a component, like

curl -u admin:admin123 -X "DELETE" -w "%{http_code}" http://localhost:8281/nexus/service/local/repositories/central/content/org/codehaus/plexus/plexus-classworlds/1.2-alpha-7

every time rebuilds the index, which is very CPU intensive. There is no way to batch multiple deletes in a single transaction.


In Nexus 3

https://github.com/xninjaxelitex/nexus3-cleanup-release-artifact