Publishing artifacts

A software project can contain artifacts that we want to publish. An artifact can be a ZIP or JAR archive file or any other file. In Gradle, we can define more than one artifact for a project. We can publish these artifacts to a central repository so other developers can use our artifacts in their projects. These central repositories can be available on a company intranet, a network drive, or via the Internet.

In Gradle, we group artifacts through configurations, just like dependencies. A configuration can contain both dependencies and artifacts. If we add the Java plugin to our project, we also get two extra tasks per configuration to build and upload the artifacts belonging to the configuration. The task to build the artifacts is called build<configurationName>, and the task to upload the artifacts is named upload<configurationName>.

The Java plugin also adds the configuration archives that can be used to assign artifacts. The default JAR artifact for a Java...