Publishing Java Projects

This page will discuss common topics around publishing your Java projects for others to use

Publishing Locally

package build
import mill._, javalib._, publish._

object foo extends JavaModule with PublishModule {
  def publishVersion = "0.0.1"

  def pomSettings = PomSettings(
    description = "Hello",
    organization = "com.lihaoyi",
    url = "https://github.com/lihaoyi/example",
    licenses = Seq(License.MIT),
    versionControl = VersionControl.github("lihaoyi", "example"),
    developers = Seq(Developer("lihaoyi", "Li Haoyi", "https://github.com/lihaoyi"))
  )
}

This is an example JavaModule with added publishing capabilities via PublishModule. This requires that you define an additional publishVersion and pomSettings with the relevant metadata, and provides the .publishLocal and publishSigned tasks for publishing locally to the machine or to the central maven repository

> mill foo.publishLocal
Publishing Artifact(com.lihaoyi,foo,0.0.1) to ivy repo...

Publishing to Sonatype Maven Central

Once you’ve mixed in PublishModule, apart from publishing locally, you can also publish your project’s modules to maven central

GPG

If you’ve never created a keypair before that can be used to sign your artifacts you’ll need to do this. Sonatype’s GPG Documentation has the instructions on how to do this

Publishing Secrets

Mill uses the following environment variables as a way to pass the necessary secrets for publishing:

# The LHS and RHS of the User Token, accessible through the sonatype
# website `Profile` / `User Token` / `Access User Token`
export MILL_SONATYPE_USERNAME=...
export MILL_SONATYPE_PASSWORD=...

# The base-64 encoded PGP key, which can be encoded in the following way
# for each OS:
#
# MacOS or FreeBSD
# gpg --export-secret-key -a $LONG_ID | base64
#
# Ubuntu (assuming GNU base64)
# gpg --export-secret-key -a $LONG_ID | base64 -w0
#
# Arch
# gpg --export-secret-key -a $LONG_ID | base64 | sed -z 's;\n;;g'
#
# Windows
# gpg --export-secret-key -a %LONG_ID% | openssl base64
export MILL_PGP_SECRET_BASE64=...

# The passphrase associated with your PGP key
export MILL_PGP_PASSPHRASE=...

Publishing

You can publish all eligible modules in your Mill project as follows:

mill mill.scalalib.PublishModule/

You can also specify individual modules you want to publish via a selector:

mill mill.scalalib.PublishModule/ foo.publishArtifacts

The default URL for publishing to sonatype’s Maven Central is oss.sonatype.org. Newer projects registered on sonatype may need to publish using s01.oss.sonatype.org. In that case, you can pass in a --sonatypeUri:

mill mill.scalalib.PublishModule/ \
        --sonatypeUri https://s01.oss.sonatype.org/service/local

This also allows you to publish to your own internal corporate sonatype deployment, by passing in --sonatypeUri example.company.com instead.

Since Feb. 2021 any new Sonatype accounts have been created on s01.oss.sonatype.org, so you’ll want to ensure you set the relevant URIs to match.

The symptom of using the "wrong" URL for publishling is typically a 403 error code, in response to the publish request.

See https://central.sonatype.org/publish/publish-guide/#releasing-to-central

Typically

https://s01.oss.sonatype.org/service/local - for the --sonatypeUri
https://s01.oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots - for sonatypeSnapshotUri

Publishing Using Github Actions

To publish on Github Actions, you can use something like this:

# .github/workflows/publish-artifacts.yml
name: Publish Artifacts
on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '**'
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  publish-artifacts:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: actions/setup-java@v3
        with:
          distribution: 'temurin'
          java-version: '17'
      - run: ./mill mill.scalalib.PublishModule/
        env:
          MILL_PGP_PASSPHRASE: ${{ secrets.MILL_PGP_PASSPHRASE }}
          MILL_PGP_SECRET_BASE64: ${{ secrets.MILL_PGP_SECRET_BASE64 }}
          MILL_SONATYPE_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.MILL_SONATYPE_PASSWORD }}
          MILL_SONATYPE_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.MILL_SONATYPE_USERNAME }}

Where MILL_PGP_PASSPHRASE, MILL_PGP_SECRET_BASE64, MILL_SONATYPE_PASSWORD, and MILL_SONATYPE_USERNAME configured for the repository’s or organization’s Github Actions workflows. See Using Secrets in Github Actions for more details.

Non-Staging Releases (classic Maven uploads)

If the site does not support staging releases as oss.sonatype.org and s01.oss.sonatype.org do (for example, a self-hosted OSS nexus site), you can pass in the --stagingRelease false option to simply upload release artifacts to corresponding maven path under sonatypeUri instead of staging path.

mill mill.scalalib.PublishModule/ \
        foo.publishArtifacts \
        lihaoyi:$SONATYPE_PASSWORD \
        --sonatypeUri http://example.company.com/release \
        --stagingRelease false

Publishing to other repositories

While Sonatype Maven Central is the default publish repository for JVM ecosystem projects, there are also others that you can use. Mill supports these largely through contrib plugins: