OSS Java and Github actions

At Digipost we use several public open source projects that we manage and release on a quite regular basis. We need to simplify the release process for security, release ease and easier onboarding of developers.

Lets assume you have all you need to deploy to Maven central. In addition you need a configured nexus-staging-maven-plugin or you can use this parent pom so that the artifact is released without you needing to log in to oss.sonatype.com and click close and release.

I will not give a deep explanation of what GitHub actions is. But what is nice to know is that it can run docker images on linux. With that we can setup an environment that can execute maven. We forked a nice action already in progress and modified it into the action we need. GitHub, at this time of writing, does neither have organisation secrets or the ability to add repository secrets with api. We wanted to save time and have only one secret per repository in stead of 4. In addition we wanted to deploy both a SNAPSHOT and a release with the same action. Build version is set automatically from either tag-name of branch-name.

Now, we need to call this from a workflow added to the repoitory. We made two workflows pr project: build.yml and `release.yml

For every push to all branches, we build the project on both Java 1.8 and 11. In addition we build a version on Java 11 and deploy this to Sonatype snapshot-repository. For every tag (GitHub-release) we will build a release and this is published directly to maven central.

PS: Sick of all the download progress in Travis, GitHub actions or what not? Starting with Maven 3.6.1 --no-transfer-progress will remove the noise leaving only nice readable output.