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Keep the newest versions

Retention is a policy, and policies live on your side. nxr deliberately ships no retention command: it cannot guess which directory segments are versions, and a destructive command must never guess its scope. The recipe below builds keep-N retention from ordinary commands, with explicit enumeration every step.

The shape it assumes is yours: version directories under one base, and channel refs at that base naming versions that must survive. If your tree looks different, change the recipe: it is three commands and a loop.

The recipe

BASE=https://nexus.example.com/repository/raw-main/releases/
KEEP=3

# The channel guard: never delete a version a ref still names.
PINNED=$(nxr channel get "$BASE/latest" 2>/dev/null || true)

# The versions, newest last, are plain directory names from `ls`.
versions=($(nxr ls "$BASE" | sed -e '/\/$/!d' -e 's:/*$::'))
count=${#versions[@]}

# Sort them however your scheme orders them; dotted-numeric example:
sorted=($(printf '%s\n' "${versions[@]}" | sort -V))

for ((i = 0; i < count - KEEP; i++)); do
  v=${sorted[$i]}
  if [ "$v" = "$PINNED" ]; then
    echo "skip $v (channel-pinned)"
    continue
  fi
  nxr rm "$BASE$v/" --ls --yes
done

Why these pieces

  • nxr ls prints the tree you actually have, folders marked with /. Nothing interprets a segment as a version: you see names, you pick names.
  • sort -V is your ordering decision, spelled in your script. Swap it for sort, sort -r or a timestamp column: the tool does not care.
  • nxr rm --ls --yes deletes exactly the enumerated names of that one directory. Without --yes it prints the plan and deletes nothing, so drop the flag while shaping the loop.

The channel guard

channel get reads one token file. The guard is three lines of shell because that is all it takes:

PINNED=$(nxr channel get "$BASE/latest" 2>/dev/null || true)
[ "$v" = "$PINNED" ] && { echo "skip $v"; continue; }

One pinned token is the common case. Several refs (stable, rc, nightly) mean several channel get calls collected into a list, and the skip test becomes a lookup.