Retention period for SNAPSHOT artifacts published to the public OSSRH Sonatype repository

Question

I am publishing artifacts to the Sonatype OSSRH snapshot repository following the instructions on Sonatype OSSRH - Publishing Getting Started.

This is all working as described but I guess the SNAPSHOT artifacts should be removed by a cleanup task run by Sonatype, if they did not getting updated for a while. So far I could not find any information on this - so my questions are:

• Will SNAPSHOT artifacts being removed from Sonatype OSSRH repo after a retention period?
• What is the duration of that period?

I did try to find something via Google and StackOverflow looking for "Sonatype OSSRH snapshot retention". Did get hints for configuring self hosted Sonatype Nexus cleanup configurations only. This does not answer my question.

Many thanks in advance for any hint - Markus

Answer 1

The documentation on this area is not great and I'm sure snapshot version will be cleaned up after a while. From previous experience I know that there are snapshots that are more than 2 years old, but I haven't managed to see anything older than 3 years. (I hope this bit helps)

Also good to know that Nexus automatically deletes snapshot versions when the corresponding artifact is released.

Answer 2

you need to define a cleanup policy, please refer https://help.sonatype.com/repomanager3/nexus-repository-administration/repository-management/cleanup-policies