Why does Nexus Repository 3 fail to start on Solaris with id: illegal option?

Question

When trying to start Nexus Repository Manager on Solaris, I get an error:

./nexus start 
id: illegal option -- u 
Usage: id [-ap] [user] 

Why does this happen and what can I do to fix it?

Answer

The problem has been seen when trying to run Nexus Repository 3 on the Solaris operating system.

The following two commands in the script that will not work with Solaris 10.

user_id=`id -u`
user_name=`id -u -n`

Apparently, /usr/bin/id has issues in Solaris 10 as it is not xpg4 compliant/ does not accept the -u option.

The following appears to be an alternative to id -u

/usr/bin/id |cut -d '=' -f2|cut -d '(' -f1

The following appears to be an alternative to id -u -n

/usr/ucb/whoami

or

expr "id" : '.((.)) gid='

Other than substituting these alternatives, you may be able to install an addon package containing /usr/xpg4/bin/id and/or /usr/ucb/*

Solaris 10, for example, is very old and maybe newer versions of Solaris may not have any issues with Nexus Repository 3 start scripts.

Running Nexus on Unsupported Operating Systems

The most widely used operating system for Nexus Repository 3 is Linux, and therefore customers should consider it the best tested platform.

We have customers running on AIX, HP/UX and Solaris successfully, but these systems are not internally tested.

We try to help customer to run on these systems on a best effort basis only, but the reality is they are not officially supported. We reserve the right to have any runtime problems reproducible on a standard Linux distribution.

The best option is to give preference to running Nexus Repository 3 on a modern Linux kernel based operating system.