Chapter 52. Publishing artifacts

This chapter is about how you declare the outgoing artifacts of your project, and how to work with them (e.g. upload them). We define the artifacts of the projects as the files the project provides to the outside world. This might be a library or a ZIP distribution or any other file. A project can publish as many artifacts as it wants.

Like dependencies, artifacts are grouped by configurations. In fact, a configuration can contain both artifacts and dependencies at the same time.

For each configuration in your project, Gradle provides the tasks uploadConfigurationName and buildConfigurationName. ^[18] Execution of these tasks will build or upload the artifacts belonging to the respective configuration.

Table 23.5, “Java plugin - dependency configurations” shows the configurations added by the Java plugin. Two of the configurations are relevant for the usage with artifacts. The archives configuration is the standard configuration to assign your artifacts to. The Java plugin automatically assigns the default jar to this configuration. We will talk more about the runtime configuration in Section 52.5, “More about project libraries”. As with dependencies, you can declare as many custom configurations as you like and assign artifacts to them.

We have said that there is a specific upload task for each configuration. Before you can do an upload, you have to configure the upload task and define where to publish the artifacts to. The repositories you have defined (as described in Section 51.6, “Repositories”) are not automatically used for uploading. In fact, some of those repositories only allow downloading artifacts, not uploading. Here is an example of how you can configure the upload task of a configuration:

repositories {
    flatDir {
        name "fileRepo"
        dirs "repo"
    }
}

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
        add project.repositories.fileRepo
        ivy {
            credentials {
                username "username"
                password "pw"
            }
            url "http://repo.mycompany.com"
        }
    }
}

As you can see, you can either use a reference to an existing repository or create a new repository. As described in Section 51.6.9, “More about Ivy resolvers”, you can use all the Ivy resolvers suitable for the purpose of uploading.

If an upload repository is defined with multiple patterns, Gradle must choose a pattern to use for uploading each file. By default, Gradle will upload to the pattern defined by the url parameter, combined with the optional layout parameter. If no url parameter is supplied, then Gradle will use the first defined artifactPattern for uploading, or the first defined ivyPattern for uploading Ivy files, if this is set.

Uploading to a Maven repository is described in Section 53.6, “Interacting with Maven repositories”.

If your project is supposed to be used as a library, you need to define what are the artifacts of this library and what are the dependencies of these artifacts. The Java plugin adds a runtime configuration for this purpose, with the implicit assumption that the runtime dependencies are the dependencies of the artifact you want to publish. Of course this is fully customizable. You can add your own custom configuration or let the existing configurations extend from other configurations. You might have a different group of artifacts which have a different set of dependencies. This mechanism is very powerful and flexible.

If someone wants to use your project as a library, she simply needs to declare which configuration of the dependency to depend on. A Gradle dependency offers the configuration property to declare this. If this is not specified, the default configuration is used (see Section 51.4.9, “Dependency configurations”). Using your project as a library can either happen from within a multi-project build or by retrieving your project from a repository. In the latter case, an ivy.xml descriptor in the repository is supposed to contain all the necessary information. If you work with Maven repositories you don't have the flexibility as described above. For how to publish to a Maven repository, see the section Section 53.6, “Interacting with Maven repositories”.