Sriram
Sriram Creator of geeky things, mostly unused junk

Going to Maven Central!

I DONE DIDDLY DID IT! I got my first few JARs on Maven Central! I’m officially one of ‘em new town boys now, ma! Lookit me fancy shoes!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Jack_Delano,_Going_to_town_on_Saturday_afternoon,_Greene_County,_Georgia,_1941.jpg

Apart from putting my personal work there, I’ve also configured some of my company’s open source contributions to get pushed onto Maven Central, and the feeling is great!

Did I have to sell my soul for it? Not at all. Wait… I mean… Not all of it.

I first made a deal with the devil, Bintray. They’re an awesome place to put all your JARs and stuff, and quickly too. Within a day you can have your JAR sitting snugly next to big-name brands in JCenter, a central repository (supposedly) much larger than Maven Central.

After that, you’ll have to sign up at Sonatype. Once in, you have to create a new issue for your first submission into a particular Group ID.

Once you’ve been accepted as the publisher for your group ID, you can go back to Bintray and select your project. You should see a Maven Central tab on the top right, next to the Statistics and Files tabs. Select this option. You should see something like this:

Bintray Maven Sync

Enter your credentials from Sonatype here and click Sync. If all goes well, your project should sync up and show up in Maven Central in a day or two. If not, you’ll probably get a completely useless error message.

I noticed that I had to put the following in my pom files for it to work. I’ll use my jaggr project as an example below:

  1. Project Info: I had to include some textual information about my project:

    jaggr Simple JSON Aggregator for Java https://github.com/caffinc/jaggr

  2. Developer Info: Developer information was required for it to work correctly on Bintray and Maven:

    Caffinc [email protected] Caffinc http://www.caffinc.com

  3. License Info: Without License Information, even if you provide it using other means, the sync fails:

    MIT License http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php repo

  4. SCM Info: This I’m not really sure about. But I put it in just to be safe:

    https://github.com/caffinc/jaggr

  5. Source and Javadoc While you don’t really need the following in your pom file if you have a better way to do it, but I found that adding a couple of plugins to get the source jar and the javadoc jar was very helpful, especially because I found it easier to just hand over my source and javadoc as a jar instead of wasting a few hours figuring out how to avoid that. In any case, the source is on Github.

    org.apache.maven.plugins maven-source-plugin attach-sources jar org.apache.maven.plugins maven-javadoc-plugin attach-javadocs jar

Oh, and one last thing - that “pom file” that Bintray cries about. Took me a few minutes to realize that it just wants me to copy the pom.xml file to a project-version.pom file and upload it (E.g. jaggr-0.1.pom).

Hope this helps you out!

Edit: I originally wrote a bulk of this in April, and only bothered completing it in November. I’m going to get back to adding an article every couple of weeks again!

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