Sonatype Central Publish

Publish your Android AAR libraries into Maven Central Sonatype repository

Intro

In March 2025 Sonatype.org announced that OSSRH service will be shutdown:

The OSSRH service will reach end-of-life on June 30th, 2025.

Gradle & Android

Sonatype documentation says:

Currently, there is no official Gradle plugin for publishing to Maven Central via the Central Publishing Portal.

Many Android developers were using a plugin file publish-mavencentral.gradle, which could be found on many websites and repositories.

Nowadays (May 2025), it still can be found here:

• github.com/eegets/UploadApkPlugin
• github.com/lopspower/RxAnimation
• github.com/bimromatic/MVVM_Practical

As a temporary solution, Sonatype documentation suggests using The Portal OSSRH Staging API, until the most popular plugins will adopt the Sonatype Publishing Portal API.

Goal

This plugin is aiming to provide a quick fix for teams which are still using publish-mavencentral.gradle.

Implementation

This plugin implements two extra tasks which make HTTP requests to the OSSRH Staging API:

• Manual Search Repository
• Manual Upload Default Repository

These two calls fill the gap in currently available tools. Rest of the process stays very similar to what we had with OSSRH Nexus Repository Manager.

Usage

In the very end of module-level build.gradle add the following line:

apply from: 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StartApp-SDK/sonatype-central-publish/refs/heads/main/sonatype-central-publish.gradle'

Alternatively, you can save file sonatype-central-publish.gradle into the root dir of your project:

apply from: "$rootDir/sonatype-central-publish.gradle"

In project-level gradle.properties add the following lines:

LIB_DEVELOPER_ID=your_developer_id
LIB_DEVELOPER_NAME=Your Developer Name
LIB_DEVELOPER_EMAIL[email protected]
LIB_SITE=https://example.com
LIB_LICENSE_NAME=Your License Name
LIB_LICENSE_URL=https://github.com/your_account/your_repo/blob/master/LICENSE
LIB_SCM_CONNECTION=scm:git:github.com/your_account/your_repo.git
LIB_SCM_DEVELOPER_CONNECTION=scm:git:ssh://github.com/your_account/your_repo.git
LIB_SCM_URL=https://github.com/your_account/your_repo
LIB_DESCRIPTION=Your Project Description

In module-level gradle.properties add the following lines:

groupId=com.example
artifactName=your_project_name
versionName=0.0.1

In root directory of project create or edit local.properties, add the following lines:

signing.keyId=YOUR_KEY_ID
signing.password=your_password
signing.secretKeyRingFile=/path/to/key.gpg
ossrhUsername=generated_username
ossrhPassword=generated_token

Important! You must generate new user token for your Sonatype account for making requests via the Publisher Api.

Then execute Gradle command:

./gradlew build publishReleasePublicationToSonatypeRepository

After successful execution you need to complete the upload process on the Sonatype Publishing Portal.

Resolving errors

Sometimes you may get into situation, when some artifacts were uploaded to repository, but were not uploaded to portal. In this case you'll get an error from this plugin saying:

Sonatype namespace com.example is not empty.
If you understand what you do and want to avoid this check, you can add a parameter -PsonatypeSkipNamespaceCheck=true

You may use parameter -PsonatypeSkipNamespaceCheck=true to skip the check, uploading artifacts as is, but then you must go portal and double check your files. In most cases it's better to drop the deployment.