Artifactory Federation Service (RTFS)

Federated repositories let enterprises operating across multiple sites maintain a single source of truth for binaries. Artifacts and metadata in one JFrog Platform Deployment (JPD) are mirrored to federated repositories in other JPDs in the same federation. Changes on one federation member are replicated asynchronously to the others.

Federated repositories were introduced in Artifactory 7.18.3. To support growing scale requirements, JFrog moved federation synchronization into a standalone service to improve timely sync of large metadata volumes between sites.

RTFS provides:

• A monitoring dashboard to view federation state across repositories.
• A new set of APIs.
• Member prioritization.
• Improved auto-healing and recovery operations.

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Version Availability And Enablement

• RTFS is available from Artifactory version 7.104.
• RTFS database: RTFS always uses PostgreSQL for its own data (events, members, binary tasks, and related state). RTFS does not support Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or other database engines for the RTFS datastore.
• Artifactory database: Artifactory may use any database supported by your Artifactory version. Starting in Artifactory 7.146.7, you can keep Artifactory on a non-PostgreSQL database (for example, Oracle) and point RTFS at a separate PostgreSQL database by setting rtfs.database in system.yaml or the equivalent Helm values. RTFS creates the required schemas on first start. Use a new empty database dedicated to RTFS (this is not a migration path for existing RTFS data on another engine).
• Between 7.104 and 7.110, RTFS is disabled by default and can be enabled only for Helm installations where Artifactory also uses PostgreSQL.
• From 7.111 through 7.146.6, RTFS remains disabled by default but can be enabled for RPM, Debian, Docker, Helm, and other supported installers only when Artifactory’s primary database is PostgreSQL (unless your release notes document an exception).

For enablement steps and connection examples (URL, user, password, Helm), see Installing RTFS.

Dedicated PostgreSQL for RTFS

When Artifactory uses PostgreSQL, RTFS can use the same database server or a separate PostgreSQL instance, depending on how you configure the platform (shared database versus an explicit rtfs.database block).

When Artifactory uses another supported database (for example, Oracle), you must provision PostgreSQL used only by RTFS and configure the JDBC URL, username, and password under the rtfs section of system.yaml, or under rtfs.database in the Artifactory Helm chart values.yaml. If you omit a dedicated rtfs.database configuration, RTFS follows the same database selection rules as other services (for example, shared platform database settings when defined).

For step-by-step examples, see Installing RTFS.