Chapter 53. The Maven Plugin

With Gradle you can deploy to remote Maven repositories or install to your local Maven repository. This includes all Maven metadata manipulation and works also for Maven snapshots. In fact, Gradle's deployment is 100 percent Maven compatible as we use the native Maven Ant tasks under the hood.

Deploying to a Maven repository is only half the fun if you don't have a POM. Fortunately Gradle can generate this POM for you using the dependency information it has.

Let's assume your project produces just the default jar file. Now you want to deploy this jar file to a remote Maven repository.

apply plugin: 'maven'

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
        mavenDeployer {
            repository(url: "file://localhost/tmp/myRepo/")
        }
    }
}

That is all. Calling the uploadArchives task will generate the POM and deploys the artifact and the POM to the specified repository.

There is more work to do if you need support for protocols other than file. In this case the native Maven code we delegate to needs additional libraries. Which libraries are needed depends on what protocol you plan to use. The available protocols and the corresponding libraries are listed in Table 53.3, “Protocol jars for Maven deployment” (those libraries have transitive dependencies which have transitive dependencies). ^[19] For example, to use the ssh protocol you can do:

configurations {
    deployerJars
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    deployerJars "org.apache.maven.wagon:wagon-ssh:2.2"
}

uploadArchives {
    repositories.mavenDeployer {
        configuration = configurations.deployerJars
        repository(url: "scp://repos.mycompany.com/releases") {
            authentication(userName: "me", password: "myPassword")
        }
    }
}

There are many configuration options for the Maven deployer. The configuration is done via a Groovy builder. All the elements of this tree are Java beans. To configure the simple attributes you pass a map to the bean elements. To add bean elements to its parent, you use a closure. In the example above repository and authentication are such bean elements. Table 53.4, “Configuration elements of the MavenDeployer” lists the available bean elements and a link to the javadoc of the corresponding class. In the javadoc you can see the possible attributes you can set for a particular element.

In Maven you can define repositories and optionally snapshot repositories. If no snapshot repository is defined, releases and snapshots are both deployed to the repository element. Otherwise snapshots are deployed to the snapshotRepository element.

The Maven plugin adds an install task to your project. This task depends on all the archives task of the archives configuration. It installs those archives to your local Maven repository. If the default location for the local repository is redefined in a Maven settings.xml, this is considered by this task.

When deploying an artifact to a Maven repository, Gradle automatically generates a POM for it. The groupId, artifactId, version and packaging elements used for the POM default to the values shown in the table below. The dependency elements are created from the project's dependency declarations.

Here, uploadTask and archiveTask refer to the tasks used for uploading and generating the archive, respectively (for example uploadArchives and jar). archiveTask.baseName defaults to project.archivesBaseName which in turn defaults to project.name.

Generated POMs can be found in <buildDir>/poms. They can be further customized via the MavenPom API. For example, you might want the artifact deployed to the Maven repository to have a different version or name than the artifact generated by Gradle. To customize these you can do:

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
        mavenDeployer {
            repository(url: "file://localhost/tmp/myRepo/")
            pom.version = '1.0Maven'
            pom.artifactId = 'myMavenName'
        }
    }
}

To add additional content to the POM, the pom.project builder can be used. With this builder, any element listed in the Maven POM reference can be added.

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
        mavenDeployer {
            repository(url: "file://localhost/tmp/myRepo/")
            pom.project {
                licenses {
                    license {
                        name 'The Apache Software License, Version 2.0'
                        url 'http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt'
                        distribution 'repo'
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Note: groupId, artifactId, version, and packaging should always be set directly on the pom object.

def installer = install.repositories.mavenInstaller
def deployer = uploadArchives.repositories.mavenDeployer

[installer, deployer]*.pom*.whenConfigured {pom ->
    pom.dependencies.find {dep -> dep.groupId == 'group3' && dep.artifactId == 'runtime' }.optional = true
}

If you have more than one artifact to publish, things work a little bit differently. See Section 53.6.4.1, “Multiple artifacts per project”.

To customize the settings for the Maven installer (see Section 53.6.3, “Installing to the local repository”), you can do:

install {
    repositories.mavenInstaller {
        pom.version = '1.0Maven'
        pom.artifactId = 'myName'
    }
}

uploadArchives {
    repositories {
        mavenDeployer {
            repository(url: "file://localhost/tmp/myRepo/")
            addFilter('api') {artifact, file ->
                artifact.name == 'api'
            }
            addFilter('service') {artifact, file ->
                artifact.name == 'service'
            }
            pom('api').version = 'mySpecialMavenVersion'
        }
    }
}

task mappings << {
    println conf2ScopeMappings.mappings
}