Technistas

Archiva (http://archiva.apache.org) is an open source repository manager that lets users access binary and other objects for use during software builds and deploys. Its functionality is similar in many ways to traditional version control systems, and OpenMake Meister (http://www.openmakesoftware.com) integrates with it as such. There are three ways to integrate with Archiva using Meister.

1.       Via the file system. Archiva stores objects transparently in a structured way on the file system. To include the contents of an Archiva repository, create an entry in a Meister Dependency Directory with an appropriate name, that contains a path to the repository location. For example, the default archiva installation includes JUnit 3.8.1. Creating a Dependency directory with the name ‘JUNIT381’ and the value ‘C:\tools\archiva-1.2.2\data\repositories\internal\junit\junit\3.8.1’ will enable Meister to include any libraries found in this directory as part of Meister builds. I don’t really recommend this method, since someday the transparency of the files may change in Archiva. But it works in a quick and dirty way.

2.       Through a webdav client. The native interface to Archiva is WebDAV (see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2518.txt for the WebDAV RFC). A Meister activity can be easily created to execute a command line GET operation against the Archiva repository. For example, if you use the BitKinex file transfer client, you can retrieve junit-3.8.1.jar by using a Meister activity that runs the following command:

URL=http://localhost:8080/archiva/repository/internal/junit/junit/3.8.1/junit-3.8.1.jar

bitkinex.exe cp /noinfo /force $(URL) c:\temp

This retrieves the file and copies it to c:\temp, where it can be used as part of a build. This is probably the best solution. When building, you really want a local copy of the files, at the very least for audit purposes, and there are plenty of WebDAV clients out there.

3.       Mapping a web drive. Most operating systems support mapping a network drive to a web location. For example, on Windows, you can add access to the JUnit 3.8.1 repository by mapping a drive in DOS as:

net use Z: “http://localhost/archiva/repository/internal/junit/junit/3.8.1”

Once this is complete, you can access the files in the repository simply by referencing drive Z: in a Meister Dependency Directory. One restriction, on Windows XP your repository must be running on port 80, as Windows does not support web drives on any other port. This is also a pretty good method, but it eats up drive letters fairly quickly if you have many libraries that you want to uniquely map.

I’ve tried all three methods in my build lab, and while I don’t think I would use Archiva in a production environment (my bias is towards actual SCM systems or a managed file system for storing 3rd party build dependencies), it definitely ‘worked’ and was fairly easy to integrate with.

Happy Building!

– Matt