Upload artifacts to Nexus, without Maven
Solution 1:
Have you considering using the Maven command-line to upload files?
mvn deploy:deploy-file \
-Durl=$REPO_URL \
-DrepositoryId=$REPO_ID \
-DgroupId=org.myorg \
-DartifactId=myproj \
-Dversion=1.2.3 \
-Dpackaging=zip \
-Dfile=myproj.zip
This will automatically generate the Maven POM for the artifact.
Update
The following Sonatype article states that the "deploy-file" maven plugin is the easiest solution, but it also provides some examples using curl:
https://support.sonatype.com/entries/22189106-How-can-I-programatically-upload-an-artifact-into-Nexus-
Solution 2:
Using curl:
curl -v \
-F "r=releases" \
-F "g=com.acme.widgets" \
-F "a=widget" \
-F "v=0.1-1" \
-F "p=tar.gz" \
-F "file=@./widget-0.1-1.tar.gz" \
-u myuser:mypassword \
http://localhost:8081/nexus/service/local/artifact/maven/content
You can see what the parameters mean here: https://support.sonatype.com/entries/22189106-How-can-I-programatically-upload-an-artifact-into-Nexus-
To make the permissions for this work, I created a new role in the admin GUI and I added two privileges to that role: Artifact Download and Artifact Upload. The standard "Repo: All Maven Repositories (Full Control)"-role is not enough. You won't find this in the REST API documentation that comes bundled with the Nexus server, so these parameters might change in the future.
On a Sonatype JIRA issue, it was mentioned that they "are going to overhaul the REST API (and the way it's documentation is generated) in an upcoming release, most likely later this year".