Nexus error "Could not find artifact" when the same Nexus displays artifact metadata

Question

On the Sonatype.com website I can read the following

Nexus is a repository manager. It allows you to proxy, collect, and manage your dependencies so that you are not constantly juggling a collection of JARs. It makes it easy to distribute your software. Internally, you configure your build to publish artifacts to Nexus and they then become available to other developers. You get the benefits of having your own ‘central’, and there is no easier way to collaborate.

The part about "constantly juggling a collection of JAR" I find intriguing.

I my experience, this is exactly what the Nexus process looks like.

As an example. My build is failing with message

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project myproject: Could not resolve dependencies for project myproject:jar:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT: Could not find artifact net.sf.saxon:saxon-dom:jar:9.0 in nexus (https://mynexus:8443/nexus/content/groups/public/) 

So supposedly the Nexus repo at https://mynexus:8443/nexus/content/groups/public/ does not contain this artifact.

Using the Nexus web interface I can however search and find this particular artifact. It is located in the Jboss Maven2 repo.

What I can also do is navigate the index of the Public Repositories and find this particular artifact saxon-dom version 9.0 manually by expanding the tree navigator. It is in the folder net\sf\saxon.

So my conclusion is that Nexus is exactly not doing what it is claiming to be doing. It is not helping me manage dependencies - I have to resolve those manually.

What results is exactly like constantly juggling collections of jars. I have to manually download those and put them on the class path in order to perform a build.

As a Repository Manager it does not look very useful.

Answer 1

As it turns out, I needed to wrap my brain around the way that Nexus deals with missing dependencies.

This issue I think that artifact saxon-dom was once part of the repo but removed at some point. See https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/net/sf/saxon/saxon-dom/

So there still is some metadata but not the jar and the pom.

When I search for the artifact Nexus finds it based on this metadata. In search results I can see the jar and pom.

Now I mistakenly thought that the artifacts are found and in the repo. This is not the case because if we try to download the jar you see message similar to below.

So Nexus caches the 404, the fact that it was unable to find the artifact. But it is completely unclear in the UI that the result is a cached 404.