Is it possible to authenticate to Sonatype Nexus via ssh keys

Question

Is it possible to authenticate to Sonatype Nexus via ssh keys or any other method that does not require user password in maven settings.xml?

I know there are user generated tokens in Sonatype Nexus Professional but we have regular Nexus.

Answer 1

According to official documentation, supported authentication methods are: Atlassian Crowd, LDAP, Remote User Token, SAML, and User Tokens. SAML and User Tokens are only supported in the Pro version, and LDAP requires username and password. So, unless you have Atlassian Crowd, your best bet is using the Remote User token mechanism, which essentially involves integration with an external security system (for example Kerberos):

Nexus Repository allows integration with external security systems that can pass along authentication of a user via the Remote_User HTTP header field for all requests - Remote User Token Rut authentication. This typically affects all web application usage in a web browser.

These are either web-based container or server-level authentication systems like Shibboleth. In many cases, this is achieved via a server like Apache HTTPD or nginx proxying the repository manager. These servers can in turn defer to other authentication storage systems e.g., via the Kerberos network authentication protocol. These systems and setups can be described as Central Authentication Systems CAS or Single Sign On SSO.

From the users perspective, he/she is required to login into the environment in a central login page that then propagates the login status via HTTP headers. The repository manager simply receives the fact that a specific user is logged in by receiving the username in a HTTP header field.

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