Working with the Apache Maven registry

Authenticating to GitHub Packages

You need an access token to publish, install, and delete private, internal, and public packages.

You can use a personal access token (classic) to authenticate to GitHub Packages or the GitHub API. When you create a personal access token (classic), you can assign the token different scopes depending on your needs. For more information about packages-related scopes for a personal access token (classic), see "About permissions for GitHub Packages."

To authenticate to a GitHub Packages registry within a GitHub Actions workflow, you can use:

• GITHUB_TOKEN to publish packages associated with the workflow repository.
• a personal access token (classic) with at least read:packages scope to install packages associated with other private repositories (which GITHUB_TOKEN can't access).

For more information about GITHUB_TOKEN used in GitHub Actions workflows, see "Automatic token authentication."

Authenticating with a personal access token

You must use a personal access token (classic) with the appropriate scopes to publish and install packages in GitHub Packages. For more information, see "Introduction to GitHub Packages."

You can authenticate to GitHub Packages with Apache Maven by editing your ~/.m2/settings.xml file to include your personal access token (classic). Create a new ~/.m2/settings.xml file if one doesn't exist.

In the servers tag, add a child server tag with an id, replacing USERNAME with your GitHub username, and TOKEN with your personal access token.

In the repositories tag, configure a repository by mapping the id of the repository to the id you added in the server tag containing your credentials. Replace OWNER with the name of the personal account or organization that owns the repository. Because uppercase letters aren't supported, you must use lowercase letters for the repository owner even if the GitHub user or organization name contains uppercase letters.

If you want to interact with multiple repositories, you can add each repository to separate repository children in the repositories tag, mapping the id of each to the credentials in the servers tag.

GitHub Packages supports SNAPSHOT versions of Apache Maven. To use the GitHub Packages repository for downloading SNAPSHOT artifacts, enable SNAPSHOTS in the POM of the consuming project or your ~/.m2/settings.xml file.

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0
                      http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">

  <activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>github</activeProfile>
  </activeProfiles>

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>github</id>
      <repositories>
        <repository>
          <id>central</id>
          <url>https://repo1.maven.org/maven2</url>
        </repository>
        <repository>
          <id>github</id>
          <url>https://maven.pkg.github.com/OWNER/REPOSITORY</url>
          <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
          </snapshots>
        </repository>
      </repositories>
    </profile>
  </profiles>

  <servers>
    <server>
      <id>github</id>
      <username>USERNAME</username>
      <password>TOKEN</password>
    </server>
  </servers>
</settings>

Publishing a package

By default, GitHub publishes the package to an existing repository with the same name as the package. For example, GitHub will publish a package named com.example:test in a repository called OWNER/test.

If you would like to publish multiple packages to the same repository, you can include the URL of the repository in the <distributionManagement> element of the pom.xml file. GitHub will match the repository based on that field. Since the repository name is also part of the distributionManagement element, there are no additional steps to publish multiple packages to the same repository.

For more information on creating a package, see the maven.apache.org documentation.

1. Edit the distributionManagement element of the pom.xml file located in your package directory, replacing OWNER with the name of the personal account or organization that owns the repository and REPOSITORY with the name of the repository containing your project.

   <distributionManagement>
      <repository>
        <id>github</id>
        <name>GitHub OWNER Apache Maven Packages</name>
        <url>https://maven.pkg.github.com/OWNER/REPOSITORY</url>
      </repository>
   </distributionManagement>
   

2. Publish the package.

   mvn deploy
   

After you publish a package, you can view the package on GitHub. For more information, see "Viewing packages."

Installing a package

To install an Apache Maven package from GitHub Packages, edit the pom.xml file to include the package as a dependency. If you want to install packages from any repository for a specified repository owner, use a repository URL like https://maven.pkg.github.com/OWNER/*. For more information on using a pom.xml file in your project, see Introduction to the POM in the Apache Maven documentation.

1. Authenticate to GitHub Packages. For more information, see "Authenticating to GitHub Packages."

2. Add the package dependencies to the dependencies element of your project pom.xml file, replacing com.example:test with your package.

   <dependencies>
    <dependency>
       <groupId>com.example</groupId>
       <artifactId>test</artifactId>
       <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
     </dependency>
   </dependencies>
   

3. Install the package.

   mvn install
   

Further reading

• Working with the Gradle registry
• Deleting and restoring a package