Use Artifactory for private library archiving

I have recently started developing my own Kotlin libraries. I wanted a nice way of managing these library artifacts. Jeroen Mols has a nice discussion of how to push Gradle builds to your own locally hosted Artifactory server (which can all be done for free).

The Artifactory wiki has instructions on how to install Artifactory for a mac, but I found that they weren’t very good. So, I decide to install using Docker instead. Installing docker is pretty easy, once installed you can run docker commands from the mac command line.

You can then pull the artifactory docker image with: docker pull docker.bintray.io/jfrog/artifactory-oss:latest

You then run Artifactory in the docker container with: docker run --name artifactory -d -p 8081:8081 docker.bintray.io/jfrog/artifactory-oss:latest

You can then open a browser in order to see the Artifactory UI:

Place this at the top of your build.gradle (there should be no lines above this):

buildscript {
    dependencies {
        classpath "org.jfrog.buildinfo:build-info-extractor-gradle:4.9.7"
    }
}

You then need to configure Gradle to upload your library to Artifactory. Jeroen’s guide assumes that you are building an Android library.

I’m building a kotlin library with Intellij Idea, so one needs to deviate slightly from his instructions. The publishing field in your build.gradle needs to look like this:

publishing {
    publications {
        javaMaven(MavenPublication) {
            groupId packageName
            version = libraryVersion
            artifactId project.getName()

            // Tell maven to prepare the generated "*.jar" file for publishing
            artifact("$buildDir/libs/${project.getName()}-${version}.jar")
        }
    }
}

One thing to note is that you need to create a local repository in the Artifactory UI with the name as specified in your repoKey field of the artifactory section of your build.gradle.

So, in the example below a repository with the name libs-release-local needs to be created.

artifactory {
    contextUrl = 'http://ip.address/artifactory'
    publish {
        repository {
            // The Artifactory repository key to publish to
            repoKey = 'libs-release-local'

            username = "user_name"
            password = "user_password"
        }
        defaults {
            // Tell the Artifactory Plugin which artifacts should be published to Artifactory.
            publications('javaMaven')
            publishArtifacts = true

            // Properties to be attached to the published artifacts.
            properties = ['qa.level': 'basic', 'dev.team': 'core']
            // Publish generated POM files to Artifactory (true by default)
            publishPom = true
        }
    }
}

Where the ip.address in contextUrl = ‘http://localhost:9090’ or 192.1345.456:90 or www.myArtifactoryServer.com or whatever.

You should then be able to write the following command in the command line: gradle build artifactoryPublish

if successful, you can refresh the locally hosted artifactory website and see your artifact there.

Jeroen also covers some more advanced Artifactory customizations, which is also worth a read. This post also shows how to host Artifactory in the cloud for free!

In order to use your newly uploded lib add the following to your build.gradle:

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
    maven { url "http://ip.address/artifactory/libs-release-local" }
}

dependencies {
    implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8"
    testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.12'
    compile 'org.processing:core:3.3.7'
    compile 'asterixorobelix.makersweet:input.output.applets:1.0.1' //in the format: groupId:artifactId:version
}

If you need to restart your docker container (if you’ve restarted your machine etc) use docker container start containerName eg: docker container start artifactory