Debugging why Nexus Repository 2 cannot find an artifact (?describe)

Nexus Repository 2 officially sunsetted June 30, 2025. Visit my.sonatype.com for archived documentation. Migrate to Sonatype Nexus Repository 3 as soon as possible.

If you are unable to find an artifact that you just know is there locally in your Nexus Repository 2, the most likely causes of failure are:

1. The proxy repository containing the artifact is not in your group repository
2. The download was blocked by a routing rule

Nexus Repository 2 provides a tool to debug the process used to resolve an artifact.  If you want to see information about how Nexus is finding ( or not finding ) artifacts, put the URL of the artifact that Maven is trying to download into a browser and add

?describe

to the end of it, like this: 

http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/groups/public/foo/bar/1.0/bar-1.0.jar?describe

Instead of returning the artifact, Nexus will return debug output which can answer questions like

• where Nexus Repository 2 looked for an artifact
• if the artifact could not be found and why
• when the artifact is found, statistics about the process used to find the artifact.

Tip: Check the "processedRepositoriesList" and "appliedMappings" respectively in the output.

Here we see an example output showing that the artifact was not found due to an exclusive routing rule for "./project/."  (Note that the repositories searched are also listed):

{
  "data":{
    "requestUrl":"http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/groups/public/test/project/1.0/project-1.0.jar?describe",
    "processingTimeMillis":471,
    "request":{
      "requestUrl":"http://localhost:8081/nexus/content
 /groups/public/test/project/1.0/project-1.0.jar?describe",
      "requestPath":"/test/project/1.0/project-1.0.jar",
      "requestContext":[
        "request.received.timestamp=1276286536595",
        "request.address=0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1%0",
        "request.remoteOnly=false",
        "request.url=http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/groups/public/test/project/1.0/project-
 1.0.jar?describe",
        "request.localOnly=false",
        "request.appRootUrl=http://localhost:8081/nexus"
      ]
    },
    "response":{
      "responseType":"NOT_FOUND",
      "processedRepositoriesList":[
        "public",
        "snapshots",
        "thirdparty",
        "central",
        "java.net-m2",
        "java.net-m1-m2",
        "google",
        "apache-snapshots",
        "codehaus-snapshots"
      ],
      "appliedMappings":[
        "public repository applied [11b647d6117038d8=
 [type=EXCLUSION, groupId=public, patterns=[.*/project/.*], mappedRepositories=[releases]]]"
      ]
    }
  }
}