Running Sonatype Nexus 3 on a 1 Gi RAM VPS — A Practical Guide

TL;DR — I self-host a private Docker registry and artifact store using Sonatype Nexus 3 on a VPS with only 1 Gi of RAM and 25 Gi of SSD. This post covers every decision made, every pitfall hit, and every config line tuned to make it work reliably in production. Why Self-Host a Registry? Every time I push an image to Docker Hub on a free plan, I think about rate limits, retention policies, and the slow creep of vendor lock-in. For personal and small team projects, a self-hosted registry gives you: No rate limits on pulls (critical in CI/CD pipelines) Private images without paying for a cloud registry A single artifact store for Docker images, npm packages, Maven artifacts, and more — all under one roof Full control over retention and access The catch: Sonatype Nexus 3 is a Java application. It was built for enterprise servers, not budget VPS instances. The official documentation recommends a minimum of 8 Gi of RAM. Running it on 1 Gi is a constraint-driven engineering problem — and thos