Repository Management with Nexus
13.2. Manage Maven Settings Templates

To manage Maven Settings templates, click on Maven Settings in the Enterprise section of the Nexus menu on the left side of the Nexus UI. This will load the panel shown in Figure 13.1, “The Maven Settings Panel”.

The Maven Settings panel allows you to add, delete, and edit Maven Settings templates. The default template has an id of "default" and can not be changed. It contains the recommended settings for a standard Nexus installation. To create a new Maven Settings template, click on the Add… button and select Settings Template. Once the new template is created, assign a name to the template in the Template ID text input and click the Save button.

To edit a template, click on a template that has a User Managed value of true in the list and edit the template in the tab below the list. Once you are finished editing the template, click Save to save the template. When editing the template you can insert some property references that will be replaced on the server with their values at request time:

Server side interpolation takes effect even when the download of the settings template is done with tools like curl. These properties can

<settings>
  <mirrors>
    <mirror>
      <id>nexus</id>
      <mirrorOf>*</mirrorOf>
      <url>${baseurl}/content/groups/public</url>
    </mirror>
...

To preview a Maven Settings template, click on the Template URL in the list. Clicking on this URL loads a dialog window which contains the Maven Settings file generated from this template. This rendered view of the Maven Settings template has all variable references replaced using the current context of the user. This is the result of running the property replacement on the Nexus server.

The Nexus M2Settings Maven Plugin supports the more powerful and feature rich, client side replacement of properties using a $[property] syntax.

Client side properties supported by the Nexus M2Settings Maven Plugin are

Client side interpolation allows you to fully populate a <server> section with the required properties either with the plain text username and password,

<server>
  <id>nexus</id>
  <username>$[username]</username>
  <password>$[password]</password>
</server>

the usertoken equivalent

<server>
  <id>nexus</id>
  <!-- User-token: $[userToken] -->
  <username>$[userToken.nameCode]</username>
  <password>$[userToken.passCode]</password>
</server>

or with Maven master-password encryption with the master keyword in settings-security.xml:

<server>
  <id>nexus-client-side-interp-encrypted</id>
  <!-- User-token: $[userToken.encrypted] -->
  <username>$[userToken.nameCode.encrypted]</username>
  <password>$[userToken.passCode.encrypted]</password>
</server>

The usage of the encrypted enwhich will result in values using the encrypted value syntax based on the master keyword similar to

<server>
  <id>nexus-client-side-interp-encrypted</id>
  <!-- User-token: {2Sn+...} -->
  <username>{3HQg...}</username>
  <password>{fsx2f...}</password>
</server>