How to upload your Java artifact to Maven Central

Previously I wrote an article about hosting an artifact on GitHub. This time I will show you how to host it on Maven Central so people can easily grab it without adding any repository tag to their pom.

Steps

There are a few things to adhere in order for your artifact to be hosted.

• Create a SonaType JIRA Ticket
• Your pom.xml needs to meet a minimum requirement
• You must supply the source code and javadoc
• You must sign your artifact with GPG/PGP

Lets look into these three steps in detail

Create a SonaType JIRA Ticket

Before you can get your artifact into Maven Central, It is needed to deploy it to Nexus repository for it to be synced into the Maven Central repository. Before that, you need to generate a ticket to register your groupId. Sign up here to generate a ticket. This may take up to two days.

POM

Your pom file needs to have sufficient metadata. You must specify these elements in your pom file.

• • Correct Coordinates
    

    NAME	TAG
    groupId	org.jpedal
    artifactId	FooBar
    Version	1.0

• • Project Name, Description and URL
    

    NAME	TAG
    name	org.jpedal:FooBar
    description	Description or your product
    url	Your company URL

• • License Information
    

    NAME	TAG
    Licence	Licence used for distrubution of your component
    Licence Url	The licence url

• • Developer Information
    

    NAME	TAG
    name	Name of Developer
    email	Developer's email
    organization	Name of Company
    organizationUrl	Company's Website

• Source Control Management Information
  

  NAME	TAG
  Connection	scm connection to your source code
  Developer Connection	scm connection to your source code
  URL	URL for a web front end to your SCM system

Now Lets have a look at my completed POM

    4.0.0
    org.jpedal
    FooBar
    6.2.25
    jar
    
    ${project.groupId}:${project.artifactId}
    https://www.idrsolutions.com/foobar/
    
    
        
            LGPL license, Version 3.0
            https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt
        
    

    
        
            IDRSolutions
            contact2007@idrsolutions.com
            IDRSolutions
            https://www.isrdolutions.com
        
    
  
    
        scm:git:git@github.com:IDRSolutions/maven-FooBar-src.git
        scm:git:git@github.com:IDRSolutions/maven-FooBar-src.git
        git@github.com:IDRSolutions/maven-FooBar-src.git
    

    
        
            org.eclipse.birt.runtime.3_7_1
            org.mozilla.javascript
            1.7.2
            jar
        
        
            bouncycastle
            bcprov-jdk16
            140
            jar
        
        
            bouncycastle
            bcmail-jdk16
            140
            jar
        
    
    
        UTF-8
        1.8
        1.8
    
    
      
    
    
    
        
            
                org.apache.maven.plugins
                maven-gpg-plugin
                
                    
                        sign-artifacts
                        verify
                        
                            sign
                        
                    
                
            
      
            
                org.sonatype.plugins
                nexus-staging-maven-plugin
                1.6.3
                true
                
                    ossrh
                    https://oss.sonatype.org/
                    19375019933d12
                    true
                
            
      
            
                org.apache.maven.plugins
                maven-source-plugin
                
                    
                        attach-sources
                        
                            jar
                        
                    
                
            
     
            
                org.apache.maven.plugins
                maven-javadoc-plugin
                
                    
                        attach-javadocs
                        
                            jar
                        
                    
                
                
                    -Xdoclint:none
                
            
      
        
    
    
  

Note that I have some additional tags in my POM i.e Dependencies and Plugin. If your project depends on some other jars, you need to specify them in the dependencies tag. Also as I mentioned earlier, you need to supply the javadocs and source, and sign your artifact.

In my build tag, I also added some plugins which will generate the source and javadoc for me. I also added two plugins which will sign and upload my artifact to the Nexus staging repository. We will look in details about these two plugins.

Signing Your Artifact with PGP/GPG

You need to sign your artifact so when people download it, they can be sure they are downloading the original artifact. You will need to download GPG if you do not already have. You can get it from here. Once downloaded, you will need to generate a passphrase, sign, generate key pair and distribute your public key. You can Find a guide here.

Setting up Credentials for SonaType Nexus Repository

In order to deploy our artifact to the Nexus Repository I added the nexus-staging-maven-plugin to my build tag in the POM. Also there are some configuration you need to add to our setting.xml which can be found in your .m2 directory.Note you need to create it if it does not exist. Your settings.xml should look like this

  
  
    
      ossrh
      your_username
      your_password
    
     

At this stage, you are ready to deploy to SonaType Nexus repository. Open Command/Terminal and navigate to your maven project and type in mvn clean deploy. You will prompted to enter your passphrase. Once done, this should upload your artifact to SonaType Nexus repository. It takes a while for it to be synced to Maven Central.

Hopefully you have found this quick guide useful.

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