Host your own

There seem to be a few options open to you if you want to share your maven/ivy managed dependency. I’d quite like the simplicity of having my own repository. Since most of my development is done on github I’d like to host my maven repository there.

Hosting on github pages

Github allows you to host static websites on it’s servers. Github pages.

Since a maven repository is really just a formalised directory structure, you can check this into github.

• Set up your Github pages, you can do this as a branch (gh-pages) of an existing repository or as your main github user page (username.github.com). Clone this repository locally. I cloned to ~/proj/project-name-gh-pages.
• Create a subdirectory maven to separate the repository from the rest of your site.
• Use your favourite build tool to deploy to ~/proj/project-name-gh-pages/maven

Now you’ll have a perfectly valid maven repository at ~/proj/project-name-gh-pages/maven. If you were to check this in and push to github, those files would be available on github. Unfortunately this won’t work with maven yet…

Creating your indices

At this point I should credit mpeltonen and his sbt-idea SBT plugin. I knew he’d deployed this to his own repository on github so I looked at his code to find out how…

I got to the point above and then realised Mikko was using a script to recurse his repository directories and generate an index.html for each directory.

So that’s the trick, you need an index.html in each directory, listing the files and subdirectories in that directory. I guess github isn’t set up to list those by default.

Doing it yourself

You could use Mikko’s script. I was writing an SBT plugin so I thought I might as well write the behaviour into my plugin, so it could deploy itself

So I added it to my SBT plugin, allowing me to deploy my maven artefacts to a local directory and then create the index.html files in each directory. You can also reuse this, like so:

build.sbt

seq(githubPagesMavenPublishSettings: _*)

githubPagesCheckoutDir := Path.userHome / "proj" / "project-name-gh-pages" / "maven"

publishMavenStyle := true

with the following in your project/plugins.sbt:

resolvers += "oxlade39 github ostrich" at "http://oxlade39.github.com/ostrich-dist-plugin/maven/"

addSbtPlugin("org.doxla" % "ostrich-dist" % "0.3")

Once you’ve added the above to your build, running an sbt publish will publish your project artefacts to ~/proj/project-name-gh-pages/maven with an index.html in each directory. You can now commit and push to github:

cd ~/proj/project-name-gh-pages/maven
git co -m "publishing latest version of project-name"
git push origin gh-pages

At this point your maven repository will be live.