Sonatype makes it easy to add your projects to the Central Repository with a free, public hosting service called OSSRH. We first blogged about this back in 2009, but given the growth in the community, we thought some of you may not have seen that post, so we decided to update it.
When you publish your project's artifacts to the Central Repository it will be easy for your users to add a dependency and start using it. However, getting your project into Central can be a pain if its hosted somewhere like Sourceforge which doesn't have a setup for synchronizing to the Central Repository. The old process for publishing your artifacts required several manual steps setup and enable an rsync location... assuming you can find a location to host your files at all.
At Sonatype, we want to make synchronizing and publishing your artifacts to Central easier and to improve the quality of repository metadata for everyone at the same time. To facilitate this, we offer a dedicated instance of Sonatype Pro for Nexus at http://oss.sonatype.org specifically to host the artifacts of open source projects. In this post, I talk about the process of creating a repository for your open source projects and publishing artifacts so that they will be available from the Central Repository.
This service has been available since 2009 and includes many projects such as Plexus, Jetty, Google Guice, Spring and Ehcache (Greg wrote about his experience with migrating to oss.sonatype.org). We have tooling in place to make it easy for us to process a larger set of requests, so we invite everyone to use this resource. As of October, 2011, we have over 1,500 projects using this repository on a daily basis.
To get the process started, go here. We'll setup a release and snapshot repository for your project, along with the appropriate configuration to allow you to use the staging features for your releases. If you have an existing repository somewhere, we can migrate that for you too. We'll even help you add artifacts to Central that you use, but don't necessarily own -- assuming of course that it doesn't violate the projects license.
The system allows customizable rules to be run during the staging process, which allows us to automatically check things like valid pgp signatures and correct POM parsing. This will ensure that your users have the best experience possible when using your artifacts, and relieve some of the manual validation on your side -- a win for everyone.
On the technical details, this instance gets its network connection via Contegix's high availability network, the same one running Central, Codehaus.org and Atlassian.com. New Relic has donated monitoring services to help us monitor and tune this instance of Nexus. Since OSSRH is hosted on the same infrastructure as the Central Repository, we are able to frequently synchronize the repositories.
Next time you need to add a project to the Central Repository, you'll know how.
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Written by Brian Fox
Brian Fox is a software developer, innovator and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the open source development community, most prominently as a member of the Apache Software Foundation and former Chair of the Apache Maven project. As the CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, he is focused on building a platform for developers and DevOps professionals to build high-quality, secure applications with open source components.
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