Quarkus Extension Registry

The registry hosted at registry.quarkus.io is a Maven snapshot repository that provides platform and extension catalogs to the dev tools as Maven JSON artifacts. Once downloaded the extension catalogs will be cached in the user’s local Maven repository and will be available to the dev tools even if the Internet network (or the registry itself) isn’t available.

The extension catalog artifacts cached locally will be regularly checked for updates and updated if newer versions of those catalogs are available in the registry. The default interval to check for updates is daily, which matches the default Maven repository updatePolicy for SNAPSHOT artifacts.

When the Quarkus dev tools are launched, a search for the registry client configuration file is performed following these steps:

The registry.quarkus.io is the default Quarkus community extension registry, but it is not meant to be always the only registry. Other organizations may find it useful to create their own Quarkus extension registries to provide their own Quarkus platforms and/or individual (non-platform) Quarkus extensions. Users wishing to enable custom Quarkus extension registries in their environment would need to add them to the registry client configuration file.

The registry client configuration file is a simple YAML file which contains a list of registries, for example:

The configuration above enables two registries: registry.acme.org and registry.quarkus.io. The order of the registries is actually significant. When the Quarkus dev tools are looking for extensions on user’s request, the registries will be searched in the order they are configured, i.e. from the top to the bottom of the list. Extensions and platforms found first will appear as the preferred ones to the user.

For example, here is a registry client configuration that replaces the default registry.quarkus.io registry with a custom one:

Usually, a Quarkus extension registry will be implemented as a Maven snapshot repository. The platform and extension catalogs resolved from the registry as Maven artifacts will be cached in the user’s local Maven repository. The platform and extension catalogs are actually SNAPSHOT artifacts that are periodically checked for updates by the registry client. The default registry interval to check for updates matches the default value of the Maven’s updatePolicy for snapshot repositories and is daily. This default can be overridden in the registry configuration, for example:

In the example above, the registry.acme.org registry will be checked for catalog updates on every catalog request, while the registry.quarkus.io registry will be checked for catalog updates once a day (on the first catalog request of the day).

Here is a complete list of choices for a registry’s update-policy value:

All the registries listed in the configuration file are enabled by default. A registry can be disabled though by adding enabled: false to its configuration. For example:

In the configuration above, only the registry.acme.org is enabled. The configuration above is equivalent to:

The registry client is not logging much information by default. However, it does resolve various artifacts from Maven repositories behind the scenes. If you would like to see artifact transfer and other debugging related messages in the logs, you can enable the debug mode in the configuration. For example:

There may be situations where the URL of the registry changes, however the ID needs to be the same (because the Maven coordinates are queried). To override the registry URL, add the following:

You can register a Quarkus extension registry as a Nexus repository proxy.You need to be an administrator to perform these operations.