# Query Regarding Anonymous Access Usage in Nexus Repository

Hi Team,

We currently have **anonymous access enabled** in Nexus Repository, and we’re planning to disable it.

After checking with our DevOps team, I learned that our CI/CD pipelines are using a service account for authentication. However, before disabling anonymous access, I want to ensure that nothing else is still relying on anonymous access.

Is there a way to identify whether any users, groups, applications, or pipelines are currently accessing Nexus anonymously?

Specifically, I’m looking for answers to questions like:

- Can Nexus logs or audit logs show anonymous requests?
- Is there any report or metric that identifies anonymous access?
- Has anyone gone through this transition, and what checks did you perform before disabling anonymous access?

Any recommendations or best practices would be appreciated. Thanks!

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Probably the best place to look is the request log.

I would look at request paths matching `/repository/*` and `/service/rest/v1/*`, each line should either have a user-id or a `-`.

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Hi, we went through this change quite recently and are still finding some small issues in less used pipelines. As Matthew mentioned, look at nexus.log and request.log and search for missing usernames (-) for request.

What really helped us was a one-time test run. I disabled anonymous access for one day and then restored it for another couple weeks before the final change. This helped uncover many forgotten usages and our devs appreciated it.

I also aimed at preparing sufficient docs for the newly required authentication, it isn’t always simple and otherwise frequently used for some of the formats (like apt), so I wanted to have it covered for all our use cases.

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I checked request.log and found some lines as below.

Can you please help me with the next steps?

Example: 10.53.152.116 - - [22/Jul/2026:00:00:11 -0600] "GET /repository/middleware/MQ/Baseversion/Linux/9.1.0.5/IBM_MQ_9.1.0.5_LINUX_X86-64.tar.gz HTTP/1.1" 200 - 875596238 9662 "curl/7.29.0" [qtp1169074028-13723]

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