Gradle Maven Publish Plugin

External

• https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/publishing_maven.html

Internal

• Gradle Concepts
• Gradle Artifact Publishing Concepts

Overview

"maven-publish" is an newer alternative to publishing with Maven Plugin, using "publish" tasks instead of Maven Plugin "Upload" tasks. The plugin generates Maven metadata and publishes the generated metadata and the associated artifacts to Maven repositories. "maven-publish" concepts and publishing mechanics are described in the Concepts and Plugin Mechanics below. A step by step procedure is available under the Procedure section.

The plugin is activated with:

apply plugin: 'maven-publish'

Concepts and Plugin Mechanics

Mechanics

The plugin creates an extension of type PublishingExtension named "publishing" and makes it available for configuration with the publishing{...} script block. The extension provides a container of named publications, which can be configured with the publications{...} script block, inside the publishing{....} block, and a container of named repositories, which can be configured with the repositories{...} script block. The plugin does not have effect if no Maven publication is added to the publications container. If publications and repositories are present, the plugin processes those configurations and based on their content, creates POM generation tasks and publishing tasks that can be used to carry out the publishing action.

Repositories declared in the repositories{...} block of the project's build configuration script are not published to. Those repositories are only used to resolve dependencies against. The Maven Publish plugin will not create a publishing task that involves any of the repositories declared in the build script repositories{...} block.

Publication

https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.publish.maven.MavenPublication.html

A Maven Publication is the representation of how Gradle publishes an artifact in Maven format. Logically, a Maven publication represents a set of files and a POM that get published atomically under a well defined set of coordinates (groupId, artifactId and version). The Maven Publish plugin publications are defined by the MavenPublication type. They are added to the publishing.publications as follows:

publishing {
  publications {
    <publication-name>(MavenPublication) {
        from <software-component>
        artifact <artifact-generating-task>
        artifact(source, configuration)
        pom(configuration)
    }
  }
}

The above syntax shows that an artifact can be specified in two ways:

1. By indicating the software component that should be published. See Software Component Publication below.
2. By defining the artifact in-line. If the artifact (or artifacts) are specified in-line, their details can be configured. See Custom Artifact Publication below.

The generated POM can be configured in-line as well. See POM Customization below.

Each publication must have an unique name within the project. All the artifacts associated with a publication share the groupId, artifactId and version project coordinates. A publication has a POM and at least one artifact, but it can have several artifacts. A very common example of publications with multiple artifacts is a Java library that publishes the classes JAR and the sources JAR.

Software Component Publication

publishing {
  publications {
    javacomp(MavenPublication) {
        from components.java
    }
  }
}

Custom Artifact Publication

Custom artifacts can be included. They can be raw files or archives (JAR, ZIP). For each custom artifact it is possible to specify extension and classifier values to use for publications. Only one of the published artifact can have an empty classifier, all other must have unique classifier/extension combinations. Note that the extension, classifier, and other attributes can be specified in the artifact{...} configuration closure, or in the task that creates the artifact. If specified in both places, the values specified in the artifact{...} closure will take precedence.

task srcJar(type: Jar) {
    from sourceSets.main.allJava
}

publishing {
  publications {
      multiart(MavenPublication) {
         ...
         artifact srcJar {
             classifier "sources"
         }
      }
}

Maven Project Coordinates

The Maven project coordinates the publication will be generated with are inherited from the project, as follows:

• groupId from Project.getGroup()
• artifactId from Project.getName()
• version from Project.getVersion()

However, they can be overridden in the publication definition, as follows:

publishing {
  publications {
      something(MavenPublication) {
         groupId 'blah'
         artifactId 'blah'
         version '1.11.111'
         ...
      }
}

Maven restricts 'groupId' and 'artifactId' to a limited character set ( [A-Za-z0-9_\\-.]+ ) and Gradle enforces this restriction. For 'version' (as well as artifact 'extension' and 'classifier'), Gradle will handle any valid Unicode character. The only Unicode values that are explicitly prohibited are ‘ \ ’, ‘ / ’ and any ISO control character.

POM Customization

https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.publish.maven.MavenPom.html#org.gradle.api.publish.maven.MavenPom:withXml(org.gradle.api.Action)

Any aspect of the POM can be modified as shown below, with the exception of the project coordinates (groupId, artifactId, and version).

publishing {
  publications {
      something(MavenPublication) {
         ...
         pom.withXml {
                asNode().appendNode('description', 'Something that will be inserted as description')
         }
      }
}

Repositories

The Maven Publish plugin publications are defined by the MavenArtifactRepository type:

publishing {

    ...

    repositories {

        //
        // repositories to publish to
        //
    }

}

To publish to a specific repository, the repository must be defined in the repositories {...} script block declared inside the publishing {...} script block. Repositories declared in the repositories{...} script block of the project's build configuration script serve as sources of dependencies and are not published to.

For details on repository declaration syntax see:

Gradle Repositories

Publishing Tasks

The plugin creates publishing tasks, based on declared publications and repositories, for the combination of each publication and repository, and makes them available for use. All publishing tasks are triggered by default by the overarching publish tasks, which publishes all publications produced by the project.

Under some circumstances, we may want to prevent some of the publishing tasks from being executed: we may want only some of the declared publications to be published only to some of the repositories. A pattern to achieve that is to guard the declaration of the repository or publication with a logical condition inferred from the presence of a boolean system property:

publishing {

    publications {

        if (Boolean.getBoolean('doPublishMyArtifact')) {

            myArtifact(MavenPublication) {
               ...
            }
        }
    }

    repositories {

       // ...
    }
}

and then invoke Gradle with

 gradle ... -DdoPublishMyArtifact=true publish

The same technique works for "selective" repository declaration.

Other techniques, such as detecting the presence of a specific task on command line, etc. can be applied.

The "publish" Task

The plugin also adds a "publish" task that publishes all publications produced by this project, which probably means executing all generated publishing tasks.

Procedure

Activate the plugin:

apply plugin: 'maven-publish'

Declare the publications.

publishing {
  publications {
    myPublicationName(MavenPublication) {
      // Configure the publication here
    }
  }
}

Declared the target repositories. The example below assumes we want to publish locally into the local Maven repository, and also into a remote Maven repository:

repositories {
    maven {
        url "${url}"
        authentication {
            basic(BasicAuthentication)
        }
    }
}

Publish:

gradle publish

Examples

https://github.com/NovaOrdis/playground/tree/master/gradle/java-publishing

https://github.com/NovaOrdis/playground/tree/master/gradle/java-publishing-multiprojects-multipubs