Eclipse p2 repositories are not meant for human browsing. Eclipse looks for certain files (e.g. content.jar, artifacts.jar) which is why it works without errors. Browsing the directory tree on our server is disabled therefore you get the 403. The first update site has an index.html (don’t ask me why) therefore you get something back. Not of much use, though.
I don’t know Artifactory but the standard Eclips p2 mirror application only looks for those content/artifacts files and therefore works without problems.
@swebb is there any way you can give more information on how you cache KNIME extensions/updates in Artifactory? I’m working with our IT on doing just this, but I admittedly have very little experience with actually setting up Artifactory repos.
So I abandoned this before actually rolling it out to users. But I’ve just had a quick look to see if it works better in a more recent version of artifactory.
The process I just followed:
Login to artifactory as an administrator
Go to the admin tab (click the cogs on the left nav bar)
This worked perfectly, but like you mentioned, we can’t see what has been cached. We don’t see anything under the Names section actually. Could this be due to not running an initial cache or something? I’m only familiar with python repos in Artifactory, and I don’t have to select them to pull them down. It’s all done programmatically. Totally new territory here for me.
My understanding of how the remote repos worked was an item is only cached after it has been fetched. So if you’re setting up maven remotes you only see items in the tree that have been requested and I assume python works the same.
Local repos you should see all items in the tree though.
What is odd is how artifactory doesn’t appear to indicate what is being cached for p2 repos. I don’t know if this is because the p2 site is a composite site that combines multiple so it isn’t actually caching anything.
We have wandered out of my experience here, but I think I saw in another comment that your use case may be more needing a local proxy with centralised control of the KNIME update site access. So if there is a bug and it’s not caching but always ‘pass through’ maybe it still meets your need?