Moving a project to Maven Central

Question

I manage many maven projects. Most of them deploy to our internal maven repository. Now I would like to start releasing one project to Maven Central. Up until now, I have had a parent POM that specified the distributionManagement of our internal repository. It doesn't make sense to deploy this information to Maven Central.

How should I specify the distribution management for my internal projects? Should I have a seperate parent pom group-internal for internal projects?

Sonatype mentions a way to deploy directly to their repositories, but they recommend using their own parent pom (oss-parent). Looking at projects using mvnrepository.org, I couldn't find any projects with oss-parent as the parent. Do most project manually deploy their artifacts to Sonatype? Where and how do they deploy them first?

So many questions! I'm amazed at how complicates this is...

Update: it turns out some of the projects I identified do use oss-parent. It's just hidden as it's the parent of a parent.

Answer 1

Once you are all set up, you can deploy staged releases and SNAPSHOTs directly to Sonatype's OSS repository. Stages releases can then be released through Sonatype's Nexus UI.

To create a repository folder for your application to which you can deploy, you open a ticket with Sonatype on their JIRA along with a reference to the open-source project you will deploy. The process is very smooth and Sonatype will help you if you don't supply all the necessary information.

While on first glace it doesn't look like many projects have oss-parent as a parent, they often do when you navigate up the POM tree. For example, Google Guava has the parent guava-parent, which has the parent oss-parent. Once your project has oss-parent and the repository is configured, you can easily deploy SNAPSHOTs and releases with mvn deploy or mvn release:prepare release:perform.

It seems overwhelming, but it's easily understood if you just plow through the steps for the first time.

Answer 2

The first I recommend to read is the following: https://docs.sonatype.org/display/Repository/Sonatype+OSS+Maven+Repository+Usage+Guide The OSS parent makes under special circumstance sense under other not. That depends what kind of project you like to distribute.

UPDATE: That link is dead now. Look here for help deploying to Sonatype.

UPDATE: For Maven Central check this: http://central.sonatype.org/