Easily convert Github repos into Maven dependencies on the fly

TL;DR: JitPack converts Github repos to Maven repositories in near real time.

Publishing dependencies to Maven central is hard and I don’t care what everybody else says. Every time I need to publish a new release of one of my OSS projects I know I’ll waste at least half a day. I wish it was as easy as publishing images on docker hub.

It’s a bit easier to host your own public or private Maven repository on Github as it doesn’t require signing and is reasonably straight forward. Because of changes to Github authentication I’ve found this mechanism to be a bit brittle and also rather slow for many and/or large artefacts.

JitPack can convert a Github repo into a Maven dependency on the fly. From their short documentation:

Step 1. Add the JitPack repository to your build file

<repositories>
	<repository>
	    <id>jitpack.io</id>
	    <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
	</repository>
</repositories>

Step 2. Add the dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.User</groupId>
    <artifactId>Repo</artifactId>
    <version>Tag</version>
</dependency>

Apparently this works with many other dependency management tools like gradle, sbt and leiningen (?).