Allow installing plugins (kar) files

[ibotty]

I would like to install nexus3 plugins. Unfortunately I cannot mount another volume to /opt/sonatype/nexus/deploy to put plugins there.

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be great to have a declarative way to specify plugins in nexus.apps.m88i.io that nexus-operator would fetch, potentially update and deploy into nexus' deploy dir.

Describe alternatives you've considered
It would be sufficient to (optionally?) provide a volume to put plugins into. Or mount a subdir of the nexus-data dir to the deploy dir.

Would you be able to assist in testing this feature if implemented?
Yes! Of course I would.

[ricardozanini]

@LCaparelli, maybe with the recent changes of allowing additional mount paths could be reasonable as a workaround. At the same time, we do not provide this one in the CR? 'Cause updating the plugins automatically would be a huge plus. Not sure how to properly do it now. hahah

[LCaparelli]

So, spec.persistence.extraVolumes should provide a way to mount these when we release 0.6.0 and I think that's a reasonable workaround too; that said, I agree it would be a great feature to provide a list of plugins and have the operator installing them automatically.

Need to properly research, but I don't see a way to configure plugins via the REST API, not sure if there are other ways to programmatically enable plugins. Maybe with that Groovy script API. If we can just download the plugin artifacts and store them at the server (not sure we can) that may be an option too.

[ricardozanini]

@ibotty you know something about the installation of Nexus plugins via API? We can easily have an interface for users to add a list of Nexus plugins they would like to have managed (installed and updated). Hence, we need an API to manage this. We have aicura, which we could use to expose such API, perhaps. If the plugins are on Maven, for instance, we could manage that. I won't be surprised if the Nexus Server also has this feature (automatic plugin update). I know that Sonarqube does.

[ibotty]

I did not find any API in the docs. In the OpenAPI definition I did not find anything either. Sorry. For me the upcoming extraVolumes looks ok.

[ricardozanini]

Well, I guess we will have to create this API then, will be more work, but we at least enhance the Aicura project.