Fetching artifact programmatically through REST/API in Nexus 3.x

There is so many case where it is desirable to pull down artifact from Sonatype #Nexus using REST API, unfortunately #Nexus 3.x Rest API are still under development…

Some use cases in Nexus 2.x:

• You have a script that uses #REST call to pull down the LATEST maven artifacts every night from Nexus and deploys them.
• You make extensive use of the #REST API in all your puppet modules
• You use the #Atlassian #Puppet module for Nexus for creating repository, groups, assigning repository to groups, updating the main config settings, things like proxy, email, realms, and so on. The Puppet module is simply a wrapper over the Nexus REST API and allows to essentially import those abstractions into #Puppet Config Management

Here is one possible workaround that does not use any REST API mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:3.0.1:copy
-Dartifact=log4j:log4j:1.2.17:jar -DoutputDirectory=./
which is equivalent to Gist Link