How To Publish Software Artifacts To Central Repository

I have had to release software artifacts to the Central Repository, which used to be mainly referred to as Maven Central a couple of times now, and each time I have found myself fumbling at one step or another in the process, and had to resort to Googling to sort things out. This post is basically a compilation of all my “groping in the dark”, because unfortunately the process of moving the piece of software you have written to having it available for the whole world to download from the Central Repository is not yet a matter of just pushing a button; or running a simple command.

So I write this post to serve as a reference for myself and for anyone else out there that might find it useful: a place to document the necessary steps needed to publish Software artifacts to Central Repository; while iterating the recurrent hurdles that I kept on encountering in the process of getting the publishing to Central Repository successful. I have also included a couple of useful links at the end of the post.

A rundown of the steps involved can be roughly summarized to be:

1. Create an account on oss.sonatype.org
2. Create and share a PGP signature.
3. Update settings.xml and pom.xml appropriately.
4. Upload your artifact to oss.sonatype.org.
5. Promote the release.

Configuring Maven to Fetch Artifacts from Multiple Repositories

It is quite common to have a situation where a project needs to source for artifacts from more than one source. This post quickly explain 3 different ways to achieve this.

Repositories settings in pom.xml

In pom.xml, you have the <repositories/> tag which can be used to specify the repositories a project should search and download artifacts from. For example: