Deploying assembly package with maven-release-plugin

Question

We use Hudson and the maven-release-plugin to do the release builds. Now I have a project which contains an assembly that puts together all needed components and then packages them into a .tar.gz package with the desired directory structure.

Now I'm trying to get the release-plugin to deploy this package to our Maven repository during the release:perform goal, but only the standard stuff (sources, javadoc, POM) are deployed.

I've already bound the assembly goal to the maven package phase, and the .tar.gz gets build during the release, but not uploaded to the repository. Any hints what I'm doing wrong here ?

Here is the assembly-plugin configuration:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2-beta-4</version>
    <configuration>
      <descriptors>
        <descriptor>src/main/assembly/distribution.xml</descriptor>
      </descriptors>
      <finalName>${pom.artifactId}-${pom.version}</finalName>
      <appendAssemblyId>false</appendAssemblyId>
      <tarLongFileMode>warn</tarLongFileMode>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>dist-assembly</id>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>assembly</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

The command I run to build a release is

mvn release:prepare release:perform release:clean

Answer 1

Meanwhile, I found 2 ways of doing what I wanted.

The maven-build-helper-plugin allows to add additional entries to the list of artifacts that should be deployed:

    <plugin>
         <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
         <artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>1.3</version>
         <executions>
           <execution>
             <id>attach-distribution</id>
             <phase>package</phase>
             <goals>
               <goal>attach-artifact</goal>
             </goals>
             <configuration>
               <artifacts>
                 <artifact>
                   <file>target/${pom.artifactId}-${pom.version}.tar.gz</file>
                   <type>tar.gz</type>
                 </artifact>
               </artifacts>
             </configuration>
           </execution>
         </executions>
       </plugin>

The other is as simple as it gets and someone on the maven-user mailinglist pointed this out. Simple use the assembly:single goal instead of asssembly:assembly. This way the generated artifact is uploaded to the repository during the deploy phase.

    <execution>
        <id>dist-assembly</id>
        <phase>package</phase>
        <goals>
            <goal>single</goal> <!-- that's all :) -->
        </goals>
    </execution>

Answer 2

Deploying files is not part of the release plugin but of the deploy plugin (release doesn't deploy stuff anywhere by itself but you can configure the deploy plugin to be called during a release).

Normally, the deploy plugin will deploy all artifacts to the remote repository but assemblies aren't artifacts; Maven can't use .tar.gz archives in its repository in any way, so it doesn't make sense to deploy them in the first place.

If you insist to copy useless files into the repository, you must use deploy:deploy-file (see the docs) to deploy a file manually and configure the plugin with an execution to invoke it during the release step. But I still advise against it.

What you're probably looking for is a way to upload an assembly somewhere automatically. I'm not aware of a plugin that does this.