Pulling Private Dependencies with Cloud Manager

For customer's using Adobe Managed Services, Cloud Manager has become the de facto system for deploying code to their Adobe Experience Manager environments. Among Cloud Manager's many deficiencies is the inability to fetch artifacts from private remote repositories.

The good news is there's a workaround for internet-facing artifact repositories. Unfortunately non-internet facing artifact repositories are not supported as Cloud Manager spins up Docker containers to run the actual build process and they do not support a pool of IPs or virtual networks for the containers. According to feedback from Adobe, the Cloud Manager team is waiting on a feature from Microsoft Azure to allow all Cloud Manager Containers to be assigned an IP address out of a defined range. Once this feature is added to Azure, AMS will be able to provide an IP range to allow access to the artifact server.

Why Would I Want to Do This?

• You are a larger enterprise and have multiple teams working on multiple different projects in parallel and consolidating on a single project would make releases and merging very difficult to manage
• You have integrations or dependencies on upstream teams for things like service connections, UI frameworks or custom integrations
• You want to integrate additional checks into your code not supported in Adobe Cloud Manager, but don't want to have to run a build twice

Connecting to a Private Artifact Repository

The solution involves two parts:

• Working with your CSE to configure Environment Variables
• Overriding the settings.xml in the project
  
  

Custom Environment Variables

First, Adobe has a feature where your CSE can request the provisioning of Custom Environment variables, this allows you to specify private variables such as the connection URL, username or password. This will require your CSE to open a support ticket with an internal team at Adobe, so you will simply need to provide the keys and values to the CSE to open the ticket.

According to an inside source, this may come as a feature in the API, which is currently available but not supported in Cloud Manager.

Setting Your Artifact Server

In order to resolve the dependencies from your private repository, Maven needs three configuration steps.

First, add the repository into the pom.xml, for example:

Next, you'll need to override the settings.xml to do this, create a file in the root of the project called .mvn/maven.config with the contents:

-s ./settings.xml

This will instruct Maven to use a settings.xml file located in the project directory. 

Finally, create a settings.xml and use the Custom Environment variables to set the username and password for the server (the ID must match the pom.xml) as well as providing the default adobe-public artifact repository:

Once all the configurations are in place, trigger a Cloud Manager build and you should see Cloud Manager connecting to your private artifact repository to download the dependencies for the project.