How to delete GAVs in Nexus 3 through Nexus REST API - nexus

Question

Is there a way to delete GAVs through a REST API in Nexus 3? From various
google searches it appears that this capability existed in Nexus 2, but not in
Nexus 3 yet. Is that true?
I tried the following with my current Nexus installation, which is OSS 3.2.1-01:
I was trying to delete GAV:
groupId = org.mycompany.myproject
artifactId = myartifact
version = 1.0.0
$ curl --request DELETE --user "USERNAME:PASSWORD" --write-out '%{http_code}\n' http://my-server:8081/service/local/repositories/my-repo/content/org.mycompany.myproject/myartifact/1.0.0
This gave me a 405.
I also looked at the release notes for 3.3 through 3.5 and nothing jumped out
that REST API support was added.
I also looked into
https://help.sonatype.com/display/NXRM3/REST+and+Integration+API. I downloaded
the nexus-book-examples and downloaded several of the Javadocs (nexus-core,
nexus-repository, nexus-common, nexus-script, nexus-commands, nexus-selector)
for version 3.2.1-01 and started to look through the code. It was not clear
where to start with a simple program to delete GAVs.
Am I correct that you cannot delete GAVs through the REST API in Nexus 3? Is
there a plan to support this in a future Nexus 3 release? Is there a way to do
what I want to do by creating a Groovy script using the code referenced by the
REST+and+Integration+API link above? Is there some sample code which will help
bootstrap me to using the above code (either 3.2.1-01, or a newer version of
Nexus).
Thanks.

Answer 1

You might take a look at our Beta REST API in Nexus Repository 3. Upgrade to a version greater than 3.3, preferably to 3.5 (just so you are using latest and greatest) and navigate to:
http://nexushostname:nexusport/swagger-ui/
Since the REST API is currently Beta we have yet to publish documentation or fanfare around it while we let people experiment with it and give us feedback.
You should see endpoints for deleting components and assets. You will likely want to use the component delete, so that it will clean up all associated assets.
Let me know your mileage!

Answer 2

According to the documentation, you can delete an ASSET (individual file) or a COMPONENT (a set of files, like jar+md5+sha1+pom.xml representing an artifact) only if you know the assetId or the componentId
https://help.sonatype.com/repomanager3/rest-and-integration-api/components-api
https://help.sonatype.com/repomanager3/rest-and-integration-api/assets-api
So you should issue a separate search call passing the GAV and finding out the componentId, then use the componentId to delete in a second call.
However I see here https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NEXUS-11266 and here
https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NEXUS-11881 that people can delete an asset just by specifying the entire path... I have tried with
curl -u admin:admin123 -X "DELETE" -w "%{http_code}" http://localhost:8081/repository/deployments/org/apache/commons/commons-compress/1.18/commons-compress-1.18.jar
and it gives me a HTTP 204 (no content). In my case "deployments" is a hosted repository. I have tried the same command on "central" (aproxy repo) and I get a 405.
But if I try to download the whole component (including pom, sha1 etc) with
curl -u admin:admin123 -X "DELETE" -w "%{http_code}" http://localhost:8081/repository/deployments/org/apache/commons/commons-compress/1.18/
I get a HTTP 404.
I know, it's painful and in Nexus2 it was much easier.