Hosting Ivy or Maven repository on Github with Gradle

If you don't have access to any public repo, but want to host libraries - then Github can be a solution.
Unfortunately, it does not provide proper interfaces for the client applications, but this is still possible.

Lets say that local root folder of your git project is /test.
First, you need to create all necessary poms and jars. To do it, you have to add this to your build.gradle file:

uploadArchives {
  repositories {
    mavenDeployer {
      repository(url: "file:///test/repo")
    }
  }
}

URL property is for proper Maven repository - for now unfortunately, Github is not, so you will have to enter some local folder. After this is added, run Gradle task uploadArchives, then commit and push all output files with git.

Unfortunately, this is not all, as SHA signature is wrong, because your git URL is not same as local. So you will need to find out proper SHA, and until you want to calculate it yourself, one easy way to do it is find some talkative Maven client, for example Grape. Luckily it is part of normal Groovy installation.

Then, you need to add new repo into Grape configuration, open ${user.home}/.groovy/grapeConfig.xml file and add your new repo like

<ibiblio name="myrepo" root="https://raw.github.com/me/mymodule/master/repo" m2compatible="true"/>

And, to get dependencies, just run Grape in verbose mode, for example like:

grape -V install my.group mymodule 0.1

It will fail, but you will get one great error message like:

...-0.1.pom: invalid sha1: expected=7f1089041d63ce7eaa5d6a35ddda3aaa606042e3 computed=8a941ef40645d449b0740023624c2f8b67b84c59 (516ms)

8a941ef40645d449b0740023624c2f8b67b84c59 is what we were looking for.
Just find file whose signature was incorrect, for example for pom it can be mymodule.pom.sha1, update it with new signature and push into git.

That is all, you have new great Maven repository with root under https://raw.github.com/me/mymodule/master/repo.

Local git setup error

Recently I decided to check GIT. I am old fan of Tortoise tools and I decided to start with TortoiseGit. It is nice tool with familiar interface.

I am a little familiar with Mercurial and heard that they are quite similar in concepts. So I started by creating repository by command “Git create repository here”.
Then I created “Git Clone” of my repository in new folder. Then I started to play and created new files and commited changes. But then, when I tried to push my changes to master repository I got big ugly error:

git.exe push    "origin" master:master

remote: error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master        
remote: error: By default, updating the current branch in a non-bare repository        
remote: error: is denied, because it will make the index and work tree inconsistent        
remote: error: with what you pushed, and will require 'git reset --hard' to match        
remote: error: the work tree to HEAD.        
remote: error:         
remote: error: You can set 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to        
remote: error: 'ignore' or 'warn' in the remote repository to allow pushing into        
remote: error: its current branch; however, this is not recommended unless you        
remote: error: arranged to update its work tree to match what you pushed in some        
remote: error: other way.        
remote: error:         
remote: error: To squelch this message and still keep the default behaviour, set        
remote: error: 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to 'refuse'.        
To C:\########
 ! [remote rejected] master -> master (branch is currently checked out)
error: failed to push some refs to 'C:\########'

This was quite confusing and error is not helping much. Also this scenario was working nicely with Mercurial, so I was really confused. But after some googling I found really nice article about git at http://cworth.org/hgbook-git/tour/, and it is explained nicely how to create repository that can be used with “push”. You just have to create it with

git --bare init --shared

It is really strange that there is no any option that can be set while creating repository and you still have to do it command line way. But issue was solved.