We've been using Nexus Repository Community Edition for several years as a central proxy and hosted repository for Maven, npm, Docker, and PyPI. Recent limits have become a problem: a few parallel CI builds can consume the request allowance quickly, and publishing is blocked until the rolling 24-hour usage drops again.
A paid plan isn't currently practical, so I'm evaluating alternatives. Harbor looks strong for OCI images and Helm but would need to be paired with other registries. Pulp 3 supports multiple formats and is fully open source, though it appears more operationally complex. Artifactory's free offering seems too limited, while Gitea or Forgejo package registries might work if they can handle pull-through caching at our scale.
For people who have made a similar change: what did you migrate to, how difficult was it to move existing hosted artifacts, and did cleanup policies plus an nginx or Varnish cache keep you within the Community Edition limits, or only postpone the problem?
5 Answers
Pulp 3 is worth a serious trial if you want one genuinely open-source platform. It is heavier than Nexus because of the Django, worker, Redis, and PostgreSQL stack, and the UI is not its strongest point, but the repository back end is solid and well maintained. Plan the operations work before migrating.
Forgejo or Gitea can be compelling if you already run one, particularly when packages are served directly from object storage. For a serious pull-through proxy, though, you may need extra tooling, and that increases the security and maintenance surface. I'd keep it internal and test failure handling, authentication, and upstream caching thoroughly before making it the central service.
Putting a caching proxy in front of Nexus can reduce repeated downloads from upstream registries, especially for CI. Configure it to cache artifact blobs rather than repository metadata, and consider whether credentials need to be part of the cache key. This can help a lot, but it won't solve limits caused by requests that still reach Nexus or by publishing traffic.
A practical open-source combination is Harbor for OCI images and Helm, Verdaccio for npm, and a forge registry such as GitLab for the smaller Maven workload. It isn't as convenient as one repository manager, but each component does its own format well.
Artifactory is a fairly straightforward migration if you mirror the existing hosted repositories, verify the package clients, and then stop the old repositories from accepting writes. At larger organizations, the cost of maintaining several free components can exceed the license cost, so compare the full operational cost rather than just the subscription price. Running an older Nexus release to obtain higher limits is generally a poor trade-off because of security updates and support.
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