Overview

This section covers some of the controls that are common between local and remote repositories.

Snapshots and Releases Handling Policy

You can configure whether a local or remote repository handles snapshots and/or release artifacts.
The repository will reject deployments that are conflicting with this policy and will not participate in conflicting resolution requests.

Include and Exclude Patterns

It is extremely important to use include and exclude patterns for repositories. This is especially important for remote repositories in order to:

1. Avoid Looking up remote artifacts on repositories that will never contain those artifacts, or that contain only a limited range of group ids.
2. Not disclosing sensitive business information that can be derived from your artifact queries to whoever can intercept the queries, including the owners of the remote repository itself.

Include and exclude filtering is controlled by editing the Includes Pattern and Excludes Pattern values for a repository (Admin:General:Reposiories:edit a repository). Specify a comma separated list list of Ant-like patterns to filter-in and filter-out artifact queries. Filtering works by subtracting the excluded patterns (default is none) from the included ones (defaults to everything). for example:

Includes Pattern: org/apache/**,com/acme/**
Excludes Pattern: com/acme/exp-project/**

Will cause Artifactory to submit queries to the repository in question for org/apache/maven/parent/1/1.pom and com/acme/project-x/core/1.0/nit-1.0.jar but not for com/acme/exp-project/core/1.1/san-1.1.jar.

Centrally Controlled Unique Snapshot Policy

One of the unique features of Artifactory is you can gain centralized control on how snapshots are be deployed into a repository, regardless of end user-specific settings. This can guarantee standardized format for deployed snapshots within your organization.
You can choose between non-unique snapshots, unique snapshots (with unique time-stamp and build number suffix), or deployer-respecting behavior (in which case, Artifactory will respect the user snapshot policy - i.e. act as a standard, non-smart, repository).

Cleaning-up Unique Snapshots

We strongly recommend using non-unique snapshots (why?). However, putting aside the question of usefulness in using unique snapshots, you can tell Artifactory to automatically clean up old unique snapshots by setting the repository's Max Unique Snapshots value to the maximum number of unique snapshots of an artifact that should be maintained in the repository. Clean up takes effect on each new snapshot deployment.

Repository Blackout

It is possible, if desired for whatever reasons, to completely black-out a repository by marking its "Blacked Out" flag, making it effectively disabled. A blacked-out repository does not participate in any artifacts resolution and artifacts cannot be downloaded from it or deployed to it.