Upgrading Artifactory setup with Remote Repositories - artifactory

I have an artifactory server, with a bunch of remote repositories.
We are planning to upgrade from 5.11.0 to 5.11.6 to take advantage of a security patch in that version.
Questions are:
do all repositories need to be on exactly the same version?
is there anything else i need to think about when upgrading multiple connected repositories (there is nothing specific about this in the manual)
do i need to do a system-level export just on the primary server? or should i be doing it on all of the remote repository servers
Lastly, our repositories are huge... a full System Export to backup will take too long...
is it enough to just take the config files/dirs
do i get just the config files/dirs by hitting "Exclude Content"

If you have an Artifactory instance that points to other Artifactory instances via smart remote repositories, then you will not have to upgrade all of the instances as they will be able to communicate with each other even if they are not on the same version. With that said, it is always recommended to use the latest version of Artifactory (for all of your instances) in order to enjoy all the latest features and bug fixes and best compatibility between instances. You may find further information about the upgrade process in this wiki page.
In addition, it is also always recommended to keep backups of your Artifactory instance, especially when attempting an upgrade. You may use the built-in backup mechanism or you may manually backup your filestore (by default located in $ARTIFACTORY_HOME/data/filestore) and take DataBase snapshots.

What do you mean by
do all repositories need to be on exactly the same version?
Are you asking about Artifactory instances? Artifactory HA nodes?
Regarding the full system export:
https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/Managing+Backups
https://jfrog.com/knowledge-base/how-should-we-backup-our-data-when-we-have-1tb-of-files/
For more info, you might want to contact JFrog's support.

Related

Artifactory Pro - Legal way for testing Upgrade

I want to upgrade my Artifactory Pro setup. I planned to clone the database, create a similar instance, and set up Artifactory Pro with the current production version, then upgrade the test instance to the latest version and make some tests(Upload artifacts, SAML, etc). If all tests will be Okay, upgrade the version of Artifactory Pro on the production instance.
How to be sure that I am making it legally? Do I need to request a Trial License? Or I can use my "production" key for a while?
Thanks in advance.
I recommend reaching out to JFrog as having a license running on two Artifactory instances simultaneously is against the EULA (as it probably is to request a trial every time you need to do something not in prod). If it is production though you should consider having some sort of DR/test/dev/staging/qa setup, artifact availability is important

Practical Use of Artifactory Repositories

In a near future I will start using Artifactory in my project. I have been reading about local and remote repositories and I am a bit confused of their practical use. In general as far as I understand
Local repositories are for pushing and pulling artifacts. They have no connection to a remote repository (i.e. npm repo at https://www.npmjs.com/)
Remote repositories are for pulling and caching artifacts on demand. It works only one way, it is not possible to push artifacts.
If I am right up to this point, then practically it means you only need a remote repository for npm if you do not develop npm modules but only use them to build your application. In contrast, if you need to both pull and push Docker container images, you need to have one local repository for pushing&pulling custom images and one remote repository for pulling official images.
Question #1
I am confused because our Artifactory admin created a local npm repository for our project. When I discussed the topic with him he told me that I need to first get packages from the internet to my PC and push them to Artifactory server. This does not make any sense to me because I have seen some remote repositories on the same server and what we need is only to pull packages from npm. Is there a point that I miss?
Question #2
Are artifacts at remote repository cache saved until intentionally deleted? Is there a default retention policy (i.e. delete packages older than 6 months)? I ask this because it is important to keep packages until a meteor hits the servers (for archiving policy of the company).
Question #3
We will need to get official Docker images and customize them for CI. It would be a bit hard to maintain one local repo for pulling&pushing custom images and one remote repo for pulling official images. Let's say I need to pull official Ubuntu latest, modify it, push and finally pull the custom image back. In this case it should be pulled using remote repository, pushed to local repo and pulled again from local repo. Is it possible to use virtual repositories to do this seamlessly as one repo?
Question #1 This does not make any sense to me because I have seen some remote repositories on the same server and what we need is only to pull packages from npm. Is there a point that I miss?
Generally, you would want to use a remote repository for this. You would then point your client to this remote repository and JFrog Artifactory would grab them from the remote site and cache them locally, as needed.
In some very secure environments, corporate policies do not even allow this (they may not even be connected to the internet) and instead manually download, vet, and then upload those third-party libraries to a local repository. I don't think that is your case and they may just not understand their intended usages.
Question #2 Are artifacts at remote repository cache saved until intentionally deleted? Is there a default retention policy?
They will not be deleted unless you actively configure it to do so.
For some repo types there are built-in retention mechanisms like the number of snapshots or maximum tags but not for all of them and even in those that have it, they must be actively turned on. Different organizations have different policies for how long artifacts must be maintained. There are a lot of ways to cleanup those old artifacts but ultimately it will depend on your own requirements.
Question #3 Is it possible to use virtual repositories to do this seamlessly as one repo?
A virtual repository will let you aggregate your local and remote sites and appear as a single source. So you can do something like:
docker pull myarturl/docker/someimage:sometag
... docker build ...
docker push myarturl/docker/someimage:sometag-my-modified-version
docker pull myarturl/docker/someimage:sometag-my-modified-version
It is also security-aware so if the user only has access to the local stuff and not the remote stuff, they will only be able to access the local stuff even though they are using the virtual repository that contains both of them.
That said, I don't see why it would be any harder to explicitly use different repositories:
docker pull myarturl/docker-remote/someimage:sometag
... docker build ...
docker push myarturl/docker-local/someimage:sometag-my-modified-version
docker pull myarturl/docker-local/someimage:sometag-my-modified-version
This also has the added advantage that you know they can only pull your modified version of the image and not the remote (though you can also accomplish that by creating the correct permissions).

RPM Remote Repository - Package does not match intended download

We're making use of a remote repository and are storing artifacts locally. However, we are running into a problem because of the fact the remote repository regularly rebuilds all artifacts that it hosts. In our current state, we update metadata (e.x. repodata/repomd.xml), but artifacts are not updated.
We have to continually clear our local remote-repository-cache out in order to allow it to download the rebuilt artifacts.
Is there any way we can configure artifactory to allow it to recache new artifacts as well as the new artifact metadata?
In our current state, the error we regularly run into is
https://artifactory/artifactory/remote-repo/some/path/package.rpm:
[Errno -1] Package does not match intended download.
Suggestion: run yum --enablerepo=artifactory-newrelic_infra-agent clean metadata
Unfortunately, there is no good answer to that. Artifacts under a version should be immutable; it's dependency management 101.
I'd put as much effort as possible to convince the team producing the artifacts to stop overriding versions. It's true that it might be sometimes cumbersome to change versions of dependencies in metadata, but there are ways around it (like resolving the latest patch during development, as supported in the semver spec), and in any way, that's not a good excuse.
If that's not possible, I'd look into enabling direct repository-to-client streaming (i.e. disabling artifact caching) to prevent the problem of stale artifacts.
Another solution might be cleaning up the cache using a user plugin or a script using JFrog CLI once you learn about newer artifacts being published in the remote repository.

Artifactory - Manage external dependencies

I'm wondering how other Artifactory Admins do that so here's my question:
We're starting to use Artifactory to manage our artifacts. Internal as well as external artifacts. The external artifacts are all available in an internal repository. This is so because of a conversion from a file based repository to Artifactory.
Now this is starting to cause issues and I'm wondering how others are managing the external dependencies? As an Artifactory Administrator I want to be sure that my developers only use artifacts which have the correct license so I don't want to have a "feel free to download everything from the internet" culture.
I want to provide some sort of a "whitelisted and approved" set of external Artifacts.
Is this possible using Artifactory OSS or do we manually download the artifacts from a remote repository and deploy it to our local repository?
Thank you in advance!
this can be done with writing a user plugin but it will require a PRO version of Artifactory. You can see here examples to a governance control plugin that was written in the past.
With OSS version you can't reject downloads of users based on license.
Hope that answer your question.

setting up a local npm cache using artifactory

I am using artifactory to set up a local npm registry cache.
I did
npm config set registry https://example.com/artifactory/api/npm/npm-virtual/
and have jenkins run
npm install
unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any difference between using artifactory and using the normal npm registry (npm install uses the same amount of time for both approaches)
am I doing something wrong?
The difference, of course, is not in the install time. Most of the install time is consumed by network, so even if one of the solutions (local registry or Artifactory) is faster than the other, the difference won't be noticeable.
Here's a short, but not complete list of benefits of Artifactory over the simple local registry:
Artifactory works for a very broad set of technologies, not only npm, allowing using single tool for all your development and operational binaries (including Vagrant, Docker, and what's not).
Artifactory supports multiple repositories, allowing you to control access, visibility and build promotion pipelines on top of them. That's the correct way to manage binaries.
Artifactory is priced by server, not by user, allowing bringing more people in the organization to use it without additional cost.
I am with JFrog, the company behind Bintray and [artifactory], see my profile for details and links.

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