Delete artifacts in Nexus based on version

If you just want to delete one or two artifacts from Nexus, the web interface is fine. However, if you've got 30+ artifacts that you want to remove based on a certain criteria, e.g. their version, the command line is much faster.

I wanted to remove all artifacts which had given version (my build had a very distinct version like 3.60-UNSTABLE.175403), so that I could re-run the Maven upload target.

There were two trees in Nexus I needed to scan. The tree where the meta information is stored and the one where the actual files are: I included so much of the path to make find run faster (where it says /com/example/app below):

$ ssh nexus.example.com
$ find \
  /usr/local/data/nexus-work/storage/<repo>/.nexus/attributes/com/example/app \
  /usr/local/data/nexus-work/storage/<repo>/com/example/app \
  -name *3.6.0-UNSTABLE.175403* \
  -delete

And of course, when trying the command out, remove the "-delete" part of the line first to see that you get the search hits you want, the include it on the consecutive run 😊