Welcome to JFrog Distribution

Overview

JFrog Distribution is an on-premise, centralized platform that lets you provision software release distribution. It is a core part of JFrog Enterprise+, managing Release Bundles and their distribution processes, including release content, permission levels, and target destinations.

Distribution provides a secure and structured platform to distribute release binaries to multiple remote locations and update them as new release versions are produced. As part of the release flow, release bundles are verified by the source destination to ensure that they are signed correctly and safe to use.

JFrog Distribution securely manages the distribution of your software releases offering the following benefits:

Structured platform to distribute release binaries as a single coherent release bundle
Secure delivery and distribution by signing the release bundle
Efficient network utilization by optimizing replication, dramatically reducing network load and release bundle synchronization time from source Artifactory to target instance or Edge node.
Auditing and traceability by tracking all changes associated with a release bundle

JFrog Distribution requires an Enterprise+ license.

Enterprise Plus

JFrog Enterprise+ is a product bundle that provides an end-to-end solution for the fast release and distribution of software through the following JFrog products:

JFrog Artifactory: all features available with an Enterprise license as well as Access Federation and the ability to work with Artifactory Edge. For more details, please refer to the JFrog Artifactory User Guide.

JFrog Distribution: an on-premise, centralized platform that lets you provision software release distribution. These are described in the sections on this page and its sub-pages.

JFrog Xray: universal analysis of binary software components at any stage of the application lifecycle providing unprecedented visibility into issues lurking in components anywhere in your organization. For more details, please refer to the JFrog Xray User Guide.

JFrog Mission Control: all features available in Mission Control with the addition of:

the ability to add instances of Jenkins-CI, JFrog Distribution and JFrog Artifactory Edge as services in the system and monitor them
Insight and analytics on build processes through as set of metrics on the end to end build process

For more details, please refer to the JFrog Mission Control User Guide.

Start with the Big Picture

Before going into details of how to use JFrog Artifactory Enterprise+, we strongly recommend that you read the JFrog Enterprise+ User Guide which gives a high level view of the complete JFrog Enterprise+ offering and shows how all of its components work together to provide an end-to-end solution for fast release and distribution of binary artifacts.

Page Contents

Quick Links

Distribution REST API

Release Notes

Read More

The Distribution Flow

The high-level distribution flow has two main steps:

Creating a Release Bundle
A release bundle is created by calling the Create Release Bundle REST API endpoint on JFrog Distribution. This call specifies a variety of parameters including the files comprising the release bundle, and different properties associated with it. Since a release bundle is immutable, any file included in a release bundle cannot be deleted from Artifactory. JFrog Distribution collects the required metadata about the artifacts specified in the request (as an AQL query).
Distributing a Release Bundle
A release bundle is distributed by calling the Distribute Release Bundle REST API endpoint on JFrog Distribution. The distribution is itself split into three steps:
1. Start a distribution transaction
  In this step, JFrog Distribution queries JFrog Mission Control for details on the distribution target nodes. It then primes the target nodes to receive the distributed packages by providing information about distributed files such as their checksum, and providing a GPG key to validate the authenticity of the bundle as a whole.
2. Transfer files with smart replication
  In this step, JFrog Distribution invokes the Replicator on Artifactory which distributes files over to the target node by replicating them.
3. End a distribution transaction
  In this step, JFrog Distribution notifies the Edge node that the transaction is complete. In turn, the Edge node validates authenticity of the transferred bundle using the GPG key provided when the transaction started. It then validates the integrity of the transferred files by validating their checksum and hosts them in the correct place as specified in the release bundle.