Publishing Shadow JARs

Publishing with Maven-Publish Plugin

The Shadow plugin will automatically configure the necessary tasks in the presence of Gradle's maven-publish plugin. The plugin provides the shadow component to configure the publication with the necessary artifact and dependencies in the POM file.

// Publishing a Shadow JAR with the Maven-Publish Plugin
plugins {
  id 'java'
  id 'maven-publish'
  id 'com.gradleup.shadow'
}

publishing {
  publications {
    shadow(MavenPublication) {
      from(components.shadow) // or components["shadow"] in Kotlin DSL
    }
  }
  repositories {
    maven {
      url = "https://repo.myorg.com"
    }
  }
}

Shadow Configuration and Publishing

The Shadow plugin provides a custom configuration (configurations.shadow) to specify runtime dependencies that are not merged into the final JAR file. When configuring publishing with the Shadow plugin, the dependencies in the shadow configuration, are translated to become RUNTIME scoped dependencies of the published artifact.

No other dependencies are automatically configured for inclusion in the POM file. For example, excluded dependencies are not automatically added to the POM file or if the configuration for merging are modified by specifying shadowJar.configurations = [configurations.myconfiguration], there is no automatic configuration of the POM file.

This automatic configuration occurs only when using the above methods for configuring publishing. If this behavior is not desirable, then publishing must be manually configured.

Publish the Shadowed JAR instead of the Original JAR

You may want to publish the shadowed JAR instead of the original JAR. This can be done by trimming the archiveClassifier of the shadowed JAR like the following:

plugins {
  id 'java'
  id 'maven-publish'
  id 'com.gradleup.shadow'
}

group = 'shadow'
version = '1.0'

dependencies {
  // This will be bundled in the shadowed JAR and not declared in the POM.
  implementation 'some:a:1.0'
  // This will be excluded from the shadowed JAR but declared as a runtime dependency in `META-INF/MANIFEST.MF`
  // file's `Class-Path` entry, and also in the POM file.
  shadow 'some:b:1.0'
  // This will be excluded from the shadowed JAR and not declared in the POM or `META-INF/MANIFEST.MF`.
  compileOnly 'some:c:1.0'
}

tasks.named('shadowJar', com.github.jengelman.gradle.plugins.shadow.tasks.ShadowJar) {
  archiveClassifier = ''
}

publishing {
  publications {
    shadow(MavenPublication) {
      from components.shadow
    }
  }
  repositories {
    maven {
      url = "https://repo.myorg.com"
    }
  }
}