Does Artifactory offer similar feature that the procurement suite in Sonatype Nexus Pro does?

Question

I am researching the pros/cons of Artifactory and Nexus.

There is a feature in Nexus that I like very much -- the procurement suite. It provides GUI to define the procurement rule. After the procured repository is populated with all the artifacts needed for the build, the admin can choose to stop the procurement and the procured repository is reverted back to be a local repository. As I understand, Artifactory provides includes/excludes pattern definition in the remote repository to achieve similar control, but it is far more rudimentary than what Nexus offers. I am not an expert on Artifactory. Does Artifactory offers something more advanced to tight control the artifacts used in the build, like the procurement suite does?

BTW, I like Artifactory's Watch feature, sending email when a add/delete/update happens in a watched repository. Nexus does not offer email notification, though it provides RSS feed. Artifactory does not support RSS feed now, but it says this feature is in development. Sometimes I just wish there is one product that can offer all these features combined. :-)

Answer 1

Ok. The JFrog folks gave me the official answer and would like to share with everyone. Theincludes/excludes pattern I mentioned in my original question is the main mechanism Artifactory uses to control the access the artifacts in the build. Besides that, Artifactory also offers something called License Control Addon in their Pro version. It basically allows you to manage and get alerted for unauthorized licenses of 3rd party libraries and dependencies when they are getting deployed from your CI server. It does not directly apply to my use case, but it is good to know. Also they pointed out that as a user, I can use their User plugin API to do whatever I want. That's also good to know, but at least for now, I am not interested in developing a plugin for Artifactory myself.

Answer 2

It's been a while since I used artifactory, but I think when you configure a repo, you have the option on applying a regex to the artifacts that it will pull. That might do what you need/want.