I am using Artifactory to support an enterprise multi-module project. Often, we change the names of modules and the associated dependencies in POM files are not updated to use the new module name. Because SNAPSHOT dependencies are not automatically cleaned up on a regular interval, these old module references can stay there for months. I discovered a few when I migrated Artifactory to another server and the old module dependencies resulted in build errors. I am building these SNAPSHOT artifacts nightly using Jenkins so I would like some way to automate cleaning up the SNAPSHOT artifacts.
Does Artifactory (or another artifact server such as Nexus) support a concept where if a SNAPSHOT artifact is older than X days, the artifact is deleted? Is there another way to automate artifact server cleanup to accomplish what I want to do? The only thing I can think of is to create a cron job to clear out libs-snapshot-local on a regular interval before the nightly build starts. Has someone already built this capability?
As far as I know, Artifactory doesn’t have an automated way to delete modules that are older than a certain value. At my shop we’ve written a Groovy client that uses Artifactory’s REST API to do exactly this.
Note that, if your artifacts are shared libraries, you need to be careful that nothing depends on them before you delete them. Our script takes this into account, too.
If you’re interested in following up, post a comment and I’ll see if it’s OK to share our script with you.