Overview

This is just a quick-and-dirty how-to to spin up a small Nexus instance to test features, mess with the API and understand the configuration elements in order to deploy a more enterprise-ready version down the line.

How-to

  1. Start the container: 
     $ podman run -d -p 8081:8081 --name nexus docker.io/sonatype/nexus3:latest

  2. Check the logs to ensure the container has started:

     $ podman logs nexus | grep 'Started Sonatype'
 2025-04-12 16:50:51,409+0000 INFO  [main] *SYSTEM org.sonatype.nexus.bootstrap.application.SonatypeNexusRepositoryApplication - Started SonatypeNexusRepositoryApplication in 2.116 seconds (process running for 2.802)
 Started Sonatype Nexus COMMUNITY 3.79.1-04

  3. cat the admin password file and note the auto-generated admin password:

     $ NEXUS_PASS=$(podman exec nexus cat /nexus-data/admin.password)
 $ echo $NEXUS_PASS
  4. We can now log-in via http://localhost:8081/.
    • username: admin
    • password: the contents of $NEXUS_PASS

  5. We can ennumerate the API path endpoints:

     $ curl -s http://localhost:8081/service/rest/swagger.json | jq '.paths | keys'
 [
   "/beta/system/information",
   "/v1/assets",
   "/v1/assets/{id}",
   "/v1/azureblobstore/test-connection",
   "/v1/blobstores",
   ...

  6. And verify that we can interact with the API endpoints:

     $ curl -u admin:${NEXUS_PASS} "http://localhost:8081/service/rest/v1/status/check"

References