The Jetty settings are controlled in the Nexus properties file:
- $NEXUS_HOME/conf/nexus.properties
Try changing the nexus-webapp-context-path property to "/" and restart Nexus:
# Jetty section
application-port=8081
application-host=0.0.0.0
nexus-webapp=${bundleBasedir}/nexus
nexus-webapp-context-path=/nexus
# Nexus section
nexus-work=${bundleBasedir}/../sonatype-work/nexus
runtime=${bundleBasedir}/nexus/WEB-INF
A better alternative would be to setup a reverse proxy for Nexus, using either Apache or Nginx. This avoids the need to run Nexus as root (in order to bind to port 80).