What is the .NET equivalent to Nexus and/or what is its use regharding deploying .net core apps?

Question

I am a .NET dev told to start using Nexus to help IT deploy .net core web apps. So I have tried to figure out what nexus is. From what I understand I would use it if I was to create custom NuGet packages and want them hosted behind the firewall?.. But what does that have to do with deploying .net core web apps ?

I feel like I totally am not getting it and the articles about Nexus/Maven make no sense to me .. Maybe it is because I come from the pure .NET world..

The original request is below... Can someone explain to me in a language I can understand what they are talking about ? Why can't I just send them docker images??

In our EA meeting today the SA team mentioned that they were pulling code out of nexus to build their docker containers. Did you want to do some research on Nexus to see if we can use it the same way? I know that it's possible to use Nexus to host your own nuget repo's but I've got nothing much beyond that.

If you could summarize your findings in this ticket I think that'll be a good starting point and we can take it from there.

Answer 1

To create an app, you can use many packages. Nuget packages, bower packages, and so on. For example, this piece of a project.json is telling "get all this packages from the repository":

  //...
  "dependencies": {
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Cookies": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IISIntegration": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.StaticFiles": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.FileExtensions": "1.0.0",
    "Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json": "1.0.0",
    "NHibernate": "4.0.4.4000",
    "System.Data.Common": "4.1.0"
  //...

When using Nuget packages, we usually get them from the official repository. But you can create a local repository at your company. This way, you can store the packages from your company in this private repository. Or, if the developers can't access the internet, someone can download the package and upload it into the local server. You can also use both servers (private and public) to get some common packages and the packages your company created.

This way, if you're gonna use Nexus, then you can create a Nuget (or other kind of packages: Docker, bower, maven) package and upload it to your Nexus server. Then, you configure your project to look for the packages in the Nexus server instead of looking for it in the public repository. Or, like I said before, you can use both private and public.

The piece of text you quoted is telling the SA team is using Nexus as their repository. And they're probably using Nexus to store their Docker packages, and maybe their Nuget packages too. So, their projects are downloading the packages from the Nexus server.

Answer 2

So for Nexus Repository Manager what I'd expect to see reading that, is that you'd be creating NuGet packages for your .NET code, and deploying those to NuGet hosted repositories in the Repository Manager. From there, these packages could be obtained either by a Dockerfile (if you were using NuGet within it to get packages, or potentially via curl, etc...) and then a Docker image could be created of your application and shared to a Docker hosted repository in Repository Manager. It is completely possible to use Nexus Repository to host Docker images, and I strongly suggest you do so (we built it, after all :) ).