Jarbird - Get back the fun of component publishing

• Build, Sign, Source archives, Doc archives, POM setup in unified way.
• Supports Maven Central, custom Maven repository managers, Artifactory, Gradle Plugin Portal. (and of course Maven Local)
• Eat our own dog food. This plugin is published by Jarbird itself.
• [TODO] Automatic Sonatype component release.

Further information

• Full documentation
• Tutorials
• References
• Source code
• Sample code

Features at a glance

Declare you POM at pom.yaml

group: jarbirdsamples
artifactId: mavencentraldemo
version: 1.0
packaging: jar

description: Demo to publish simple library to Maven Central

licenses:
  - name: Apache-2.0
    dist: repo

developers:
  - id: demo
    name: Jarbird Demo
    email: jarbird.demo@fake-email.com

scm:
  repoType: github.com
  repoName: hkhc/jarbird-samples/mavencentral

Specify your credentials at gradle.properties

...or environment variables

signing.gnupg.keyName=[Key ID from GNuPG] 
signing.gnupg.passphrase=[Passphrase of GNUPG keybox]
repository.mavencentral.username=[OSS sonatype server username]
repository.mavencentral.password=[OSS sonatype server password]
# true if the account is created after Feb 2021
repository.mavencentral.newUser=true

Declare the plugin

plugins {
    id("io.hkhc.jarbird") version "0.7.0"        
}
// ...
jarbird {
    mavenCentral()
    pub {}
}

Publish your component

$ ./gradlew jbPublish

Components publishing is far too complicated

Publishing libraries to public repositories like Maven, Bintray are not really difficult at all, but it is a nuisance, especially for first-timer. Setting up accounts is a lengthy process, and we need to set our build script right so that those repositories accept our submission. By "right", we mean using proper plugins, declaring proper publication, and executing proper Gradle tasks. Once we have set up all those things, it is mostly "just work". So there is a significant fiction to make our components available in repositories rather than copy-and-paste among projects.

Worst still, the build script code to publish artefacts to Maven is quite different from the script for Bintray repository. We need a double effort if we want to publish to both repositories. It is possible to publish components to Maven Central by Bintray server, but that means vendor lock up.

The complete Gradle script to publish component is filled with boilerplate code. It is hard to read and the project-specific details are buried in the jungle of tasks and configurations.

“Jarbird” Gradle plugin is designed to make these things simple. Simply speaking, this plugin wraps up the boilerplate code to publish components to major public repositories, including Maven Central, Bintray/JCenter, Gradle’s own plugin repository. Its aim is making simple thing simple, so undoubtedly there are things that can be done by hand-coding the publishing code in Gradle build script, but cannot be done by this plugin. However, if things are really complicated, they deserve effort to do it in the good old way.

What's new

See RELEASE.md