How to use Nexus instead of maven for Grails app

I have a grails 2.5.3 app that uses Plugins and dependencies from maven. Now I'd like to use a Nexus server setup inside the company as a proxy for all the dependencies my app uses. However, I've never used Nexus before so I'm a bit confused as to how things would work.

I generated a POM.xml for my grails app using grails create-pom com.mycompany. The generated pom has the following artifactId

<groupId>com.mycompany</groupId>
<artifactId>myproj</artifactId>
<packaging>grails-app</packaging>
<version>1.0.0.R1</version>

Then I added the following to the POM.xml

  <distributionManagement>
    <repository>
      <id>nexus</id>
      <name>Nexus Repo</name>
      <url>https://companynextus/content/repositories/myproj</url>
    </repository>
  </distributionManagement>

Then I run mvn deploy

Now I can see my entire WAR file and POM at https://companynextus/content/repositories/myproj/com/mycompany/myproj/1.0.0.R1/

At this point I just change my BuildConfig.groovy from:

repositories {
    inherits true // Whether to inherit repository definitions from plugins

    grailsPlugins()
    grailsHome()
    mavenLocal()
    grailsCentral()
    mavenCentral()
}

To:

repositories {
    inherits true // Whether to inherit repository definitions from plugins

    grailsPlugins()
    grailsHome()
    grailsRepo "https://companynextus/content/repositories/myproj/com/mycompany/myproj/1.0.0.R1"
    mavenRepo "https://companynextus/content/repositories/myproj/com/mycompany/myproj/1.0.0.R1"
}

But I get error while doing grails prod war

Resolve error obtaining dependencies: Could not find artifact org.grails.plugins:tomcat:zip:8.0.33 in https://companynextus/content/repositories/myproj/com/mycompany/myproj/1.0.0.R1(https://companynextus/content/repositories/myproj/com/mycompany/myproj/1.0.0.R1) (Use --stacktrace to see the full trace)

Solution

We created a nexus repository group (http://nexushost/content/groups/repo), that caches all external maven repos (maven central, grails repos), and our internal releases repo too.

As for deployment, we have one repo for snapshots (http://nexushost/content/repositories/snapshots), and one repo for releases (http://nexushost/content/repositories/releases/).

This is an excerpt of our BuildConfig with grails 2.5.1. It should not be very different with your version:

def env = System.getenv() + new HashMap(System.properties)

grails {
    project {
        repos {
            SNAPSHOTS {
                url = "http://nexushost/content/repositories/snapshots"
                username = env.NEXUS_DEPLOY
                password = env.NEXUS_DEPLOY_PASS
            }
            RELEASES {
                url = "http://nexushost/content/repositories/releases/"
                username = env.NEXUS_DEPLOY
                password = env.NEXUS_DEPLOY_PASS
            }
        }
    }
}


grails.project.dependency.resolver = "maven" 
grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
    inherits("global") {
    }
    repositories {
        inherits true

        mavenLocal()
        mavenRepo('http://nexushost/content/groups/repo') {
            auth(
                    username: env.NEXUS_BUILD,
                    password: env.NEXUS_BUILD_PASS
            )
        }
        mavenRepo('http://nexushost/content/repositories/snapshots') {
            auth(
                    username: env.NEXUS_BUILD,
                    password: env.NEXUS_BUILD_PASS
            )
            updatePolicy 'always'
        }
    }

//....
}