Artifactory Terminology and Navigation

Artifactory provides you with the features you need to manage your binary repositories, both through an intuitive UI and with an extensive set of APIs.

The Artifactory UI is divided into four main modules:Artifacts, Search, Build and Admin

Home

The Home module serves as a dashboard where you can easily access general information and commonly used features.

Artifacts

The Artifacts module is used to browse the repositories in your system and search for artifacts using a number of different methods. While browsing through repositories, Artifactory displays useful information and provides you with tools to perform essential actions to manage your repositories.

Search

The Search module is where you can search for Artifacts by name, package type, properties and a variety of additional methods offered by Artifactory. For more details, please refer to Searching for Artifacts.

Build

The Build module displays the Build Browser where you can view all the CI server projects that output their builds to Artifactory. Here you can drill down to view detailed build information and compare one build to another.

Admin

The Admin tab is only available to users who are defined as administrators in the system, and is used to perform a variety of administration and maintenance activities such as:

Configuring different entities such as repositories, software licenses, proxies, mail servers and more
Managing different aspects of system security such as user definitions, groups, permissions, LDAP integration and more
Managing backup and indexing of repositories
Managing import and export of repositories or of the entire system
Accessing system information and scheduling different cleanup operations

Set Me Up

Artifactory's Set Me Up feature provides you with the commands you can use to deploy and resolve artifacts to and from specific repositories. Simply select any item in the Tree Browser or Simple Browser and click Set Me Up. Regardless of what was selected when you pop up this dialog, you can select a Tool and a specific Repository (the list of repositories displayed corresponds to the tool you selected), and Artifactory will provide the relevant commands according to your selection.

Inserting User Credentials

Every Set Me Up dialog includes an "Insert Credentials" button. When pressed, Artifactory will prompt you for your password and will then replace generic credential placeholders used in code snippets with your own corresponding credentials.

Keyboard Shortcuts

To facilitate easy navigation through its UI, Artifactory offers the following set of keyboard shortcuts:

Repository Types in Artifactory

Artifactory hosts three types of repository:

Local

Local repositories are physical, locally-managed repositories into which you can deploy artifacts. Artifacts in a local repository can be accessed directly using the following URL:
http://<host>:<port>/artifactory/<local-repository-name>/<artifact-path>
Artifactory is deployed with a number of pre-configured local repositories which can be used for internal and external releases, snapshots and plugins.

Remote

A remote repository serves as a caching proxy for a repository managed at a remote URL (which may itself be another Artifactory remote repository). Artifacts are stored and updated in remote repositories according to various configuration parameters that control the caching and proxying behavior. You can remove artifacts from a remote repository cache but you cannot actually deploy a new artifact into a remote repository.
Artifacts in a remote repository can be accessed directly using the following URL:
http://<host>:<port>/artifactory/<remote-repository-name>/<artifact-path>
This URL will fetch a remote artifact to the cache if it has not yet been stored.

Virtual

A virtual repository (or "repository group") aggregates several repositories with the same package type under a common URL. The repository is virtual in that you can resolve and retrieve artifacts from it but you cannot deploy artifacts to it.

Local and remote repositories are true physical repositories, while a virtual repository is actually an aggregation of them used to create controlled domains for search and resolution of artifacts.
To configure repositories, in the Admin module, select Repositories.
Repositories can be created, deleted, edited, ordered and aggregated.

Single Package Type

When creating any repository, you must specify its package type; this is a fundamental characteristic of the repository and can not be changed later. Once the repository type is set, Artifactory will index artifacts and calculate the corresponding metadata for every package uploaded which optimizes performance when resolving artifacts. Note that virtual repositories can only include repositories of the same type.

Generic Repositories

You may define a repository as Generic in which case it has no particular type, and you may upload packages of any type. Generic repositories do not maintain separate package indexes. For using a client associated with a specific package type (e.g. yum, gem) you should create a matching repository.

General Resolution Order

You can set the order in which repositories of each type (local, remote and virtual) are searched and resolved by simply ordering them accordingly within the corresponding section of the Configure Repositories page. To set the order you need to add the repositories to the list of selected repositories in the order in which they should be searched to resolve artifacts.
The order in which repositories are searched is also affected by additional factors such as security privileges, include/exclude patterns and policies for handling snapshots and releases.