September 2019 Summaries

Developers in the JFrog Ecosystem team often face stability issues when relying on external servers to download pre-build tools via various package managers such as Chocolatey, Homebrew, and npm, which can lead to slow and unstable builds. These issues are exacerbated when using automatic build tools like Travis CI and Jenkins, resulting in occasional 5xx server errors and slow package downloads. To address these challenges, the use of Artifactory remote repositories is recommended as a solution, offering a proxy to remote servers that caches artifacts locally, thereby speeding up builds and providing a secure environment. An example is provided with the Chocolatey package manager, where a remote Nuget repository is defined in Artifactory to resolve 503 server errors, enhancing the stability and efficiency of builds by serving as a reliable source for package downloads. The blog post promises further exploration of use cases for other package managers like Homebrew and Yum in a subsequent article.

The recent release of JFrog CLI 1.27.0 introduces a powerful feature that allows users to perform operations on multiple repositories with a single command by utilizing wildcards throughout the entire path, including the repository name. This enhancement streamlines interactions with JFrog Artifactory, enabling users to search, upload, download, copy, move, and delete files without needing to specify the exact repository name, thus facilitating actions on files dispersed across various repositories. The update supports wildcards and regular expressions, offering flexibility and convenience, such as setting properties for files with specific patterns or finding files like package.json across repositories. The release encourages users to explore the new capabilities to enhance their file management processes.