The better Maven Central

Maven Central is the most used repository for Java artifacts. Almost every Gradle file starts with:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
        // maybe other repos here        

Yet publishing with Sontatype, OSSHR and Nexus (this article explains the terms really well) is a very slow and painful process:

Source: https://jfrog.com/blog/bintray-as-pain-free-gateway-to-maven-central/.

You could argue that Jfrog is biased but I fully agree with all the statements above. Now that the Jfrog alternative JCenter is gone, there’s imo only one solution left for open source projects and that solution is amazing: jitpack.io.

Amazing because there’s literally no effort to publish artifacts once the maven or maven-publish plugin have been configured (which needs to be done in any case) -> see my other article here.

If you have a GitHub account there’s almost nothing to do to get Jitpack.io. going. Just grant Jitpack.io access to your public repos and you’re done. And with done I mean literally done.

Jitpack.io is so simple that I didn’t even notice that my artifacts e.g. for this repo: https://github.com/1gravity/Android-RTEditor were automatically published (while I worked on the Maven Central publication). Jitpack automatically built and published my library:

• because it has access to my repos
• because I tagged my commits with a version number, e.g. v1.7.3
• because the maven-publish task was configured
• because jitpack.io is an awesome tool ;-)

To use the published artifacts you need to add jitpack.io as a Maven repo but that’s the only tiny drawback compared to artifacts published in Maven Central:

allprojects {
    repositories {
	...
	maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
    }
}

I don’t need to go through Sonatype’s painful signup process and I don’t need to set up a build pipeline in the open source repository of my choice.

I did this for Android projects (e.g. here and here) and backend Java projects (e.g. here), it’s equally simple.