how-to-maven-central

Reference project for deploying a Maven project to Maven Central via Sonatype OSSRH.

Deploying to Sonatype OSSRH is more complicated than just mvn deploy: it requires users to become familiar with the Sonatype Nexus Staging workflow and its associated tooling the nexus-staging-maven-plugin.

There are different ways to use the nexus-staging-maven-plugin. This example project demonstrates two different ways.

staging-deploy workflow

The nexus-staging-maven-plugin can perform the whole staging and release workflow as part of the Maven project's build. This is the simplest way to configure releases to Maven Central and should work for most OSS projects.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.sonatype.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>nexus-staging-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.6.8</version>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
  <configuration>
   <serverId>ossrh</serverId>
   <nexusUrl>https://oss.sonatype.org/</nexusUrl>
   <autoReleaseAfterClose>true</autoReleaseAfterClose>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

There are plenty of blog posts and guides on how to configure the nexus-staging-maven-plugin in this configuration. Tag v1.1 of this project was deployed using this configuration.

Manual Staging Bundle Creation and Deployment

Examples using the Manual Staging Bundle Creation and Deployment workflow are less common. In this workflow, users use scripts to manually create and deploy artifacts to the staging repository in OSSRH. The nexus-staging-maven-plugin is still involved, but instead of being integrated into a Maven build, this workflow calls for using the plugin's "rc" goals to manually open, close, release, list, and drop staging repositories. The deploy.sh shows an example of using these goals in a script.