[OSD600] Releasing a project on Maven Central

2 min readNov 26, 2021

This week, I published my jssg-project to Maven Central and I would like to journal my process so that it will help others (as well as me) save time on the future publishment.

My project on Maven Central

Preconditions

Type mvn compile and mvn test to make sure the project is built successfully and there are no unit test failures

Create a repository for the project in the Maven Central Repository

Create a Sonatype account from here
Create a Sonatype ticket from here.

Notes:

The only allowed groupIdfor Github projects are io.github.* for example: io.github.trangntt-016
Make sure that the groupId in your project matches with the groupId in your ticket. The groupId is like the address of your project, it has nothing to do with the project structure.
To verify that you are the owner of your GH, you’ll be asked to create a temporary, public repository with a format like https://github.com/trangntt-016/OSSRH-75407 in which OSSRH-75407 is your ticket number
Once your ticket is raised, you can wait as someone needs to be assigned to it and take action. If it’s weekend or on holiday, chances are it will take more time for your repository to get approved (tickets is tagged as resolved ). And you can only release your project after your

Setting up file signing through GnuPG

Follow the instruction to setup GnuPG from here

However, the Url’s keyserver in the instruction is deprecated. You should use keyserver.ubuntu.com and the command line to send your public key to the server is like:

gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --send-keys BA924657A09D7D13E80A5B19839A6A1B6C672CE9

To verify whether it was been sent without errors, execute the following command to receive the key:

gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys BA924657A09D7D13E80A5B19839A6A1B6C672CE9

Setting up `pom.xml` and `settings.xml`

Follow the instruction to set up pom.xml and deployment from here

Note: As of February 2021, all new projects began being provisioned on https://s01.oss.sonatype.org/ so you cannot use https://oss.sonatype.org

Deployment and Release

mvn clean deploy

The successful execution of this command will show the snapshot of your project here

Then we need to release the project using the command:

mvn clean deploy -P release

Notes:

When mvn clean deploy if you have 401 error though your credentials are correct, check the path of settings.xml and make sure it’s under ~/.m2/ and not ~/.m2/repository
Make sure the version in your project is set with SNAPSHOT 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT because you’re still under active development.
When uploading your codes to GH and if your project has CI/CD which does some build , add -Dpgp.skip to skip asking for PGP’s keys.

Testing

I asked my friend to test my library and it works as I expected.

Happy coding