Overview

Artifactory lets you define a virtual repository that is a collection of local, remote and other virtual repositories.
A virtual repository hides the underlying repositories and lets users work against a single well-known URL, while allowing you to change the participating repositories and their rules without requiring any client-side changes.

Setting Up a Virtual Repo

From the UI go to Admin:General:Repositories and create a new virtual repository.
Add the repositories you wish to be part of the virtual repositories by dragging and dropping them into the virtual repository list of selected repositories.
The actual list of real repositories (after expanding other virtual repositories used) will be displayed.

The search/resolution order when requesting artifacts from a virtual repository is always: local repositories, remote repository caches and finally remote repositories themselves.

You can also instruct Artifactory whether the repository should include remote repositories in artifacts resolution for request coming from other Artifactory instances.

Nesting Virtual Repositories

The ability to nest virtual repositories is unique to Artifactory. It allows for greater reuse of virtual repositories between themselves.

Artifactory will detect when overly nesting repositories ends up in an infinite loop and will warn against that.