Publishing Your Java Library to Maven Central: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

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Introduction

Creating a Java library is a significant milestone for many developers, offering a way to encapsulate reusable code for personal projects or for sharing with the global developer community. Whether it’s to avoid duplication of effort across projects or to contribute to the open-source ecosystem, publishing your Java library to Maven Central is a rewarding endeavor. This detailed guide will walk you through the entire process, using a practical example of a Java library for generating universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) for entities in applications.

Step 1: Setting Up Your Java Library Project

Project Initialization with Maven

To kick things off, you’ll need to generate your project structure. Open your terminal and run:

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.example.uuidgenerator -DartifactId=uuid-generator -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DarchetypeVersion=1.4 -DinteractiveMode=false

Ensure you replace com.example.uuidgenerator with your desired group ID. This step generates a Maven project with a default pom.xml file.

Customize pom.xml for Java 17