Hi, I am investigating options for distributing ve...

# multiplatform

[Rak]

Hi, I am investigating options for distributing versions of my KMM library to my existing apps. Regarding android, a lot of articles talk about using Maven, however isn’t that open to all? Most companies create closed source code. I assume in that case a solution like Nexus/Artifactory? Or does maven support private uploads?

[Big Chungus]

If by maven you mean maven central then no. In itself it's just a public instance of nexus. You can spin up a free jfrog artifactory instance in the cloud to store your artifacts privately

[Big Chungus]

Or just install your own nexus server on raspberry pi or something

[Rak]

i work in a corporate environment so just adding servers is not easy.

[Big Chungus]

Then go for a free artifactory cloud instance

[Rak]

I was thinking maybe i could use CI. The KMM project generates a aar file and then I can pass it to the android project and have it commited into that repo

[Rak]

not thought it through yet!

[Big Chungus]

https://jfrog.com/pricing/

[Big Chungus]

Isn't this free tier sufficient for your needs?

[Rak]

thats not really the point

[Big Chungus]

Isn't it?

[kqr]

in the end I think if company is hosting sources it should have its own artifact repository

[Rak]

I would ahve to get approval to use thrird parties

[Rak]

I wonder if github has something similar

[Big Chungus]

If you just need to transfer raw aar, any cloud storage solution will do. Even google drive is fine

[Rak]

which is why i was thinking of using CI. It can host the arr file until i download to the apps

[Big Chungus]

But if you want to make it available as a proper maven artifact, you'll need to put some extra work in. I've seen people using github repo as maven artifactory server as well

[Rak]

“github repo as maven artifactory server” - any sources?

[Big Chungus]

But aar file alone is not enough as you lose all your metadata (e.g. dependencies)

[Rak]

what do you mean?

[Rak]

isnt the aar file “fat”?

[Big Chungus]

Not for libs, for obvious reasons

[Big Chungus]

https://dzone.com/articles/using-github-as-maven-repository

[Rak]

interesting, do you know if its possible to do something similar with gradle?

[Big Chungus]

In short, you need to create a new repo and then declare it in your gradle as this

repositories {
  maven("<https://rawgit.com/USERNAME/REPONAME/BRANCHNAME|https://rawgit.com/USERNAME/REPONAME/BRANCHNAME>") {
credentials (...)
}
}

[Big Chungus]

Publish to it and declare it as source repo on another project

[Big Chungus]

Gradle will take care of putting stuff in the right places

[Rak]

now I am thinking the better approach is to create the kmm shared module inside my existing android app

[Rak]

then i have to work out what to do about iOS…

[Big Chungus]

That's the recommended approach

[Big Chungus]

Move ios to android repo as well

[Big Chungus]

Keep everything in the monorepo

[Rak]

thats not going to work

[Rak]

to much disruption

[Big Chungus]

Alternatively, connect your kmm module to android or ios repos with git submodules

[Big Chungus]

That way you can still keep three repos, but have them connected

[Rak]

that might warrant investigation - though a few years ago i used git submodules and it was a nightmore

[Big Chungus]

Tbh, I think the easiest solution for your case would be to just create that free artifactory instance and publish your kmm stuff there

[Rak]

perhaps, but not a solution for iOS

[Big Chungus]

You can push both, aar and pod to artifactory, both built from same kmm project

[Rak]

i’ll definately mention that as a possible solution, thanks for your help, very much appreiciated

[Big Chungus]

That way, both consumers can be oblivious about there even being kmm module. On consumer side it would be just consuming native libs

[Big Chungus]

And artifactory is just one of the options for artifact repository server. You can do the same with nexus as well.

[hfhbd]

Just use GitHub's maven repo if you want: https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-packages-registry/working-with-the-apache-maven-registry

[Big Chungus]

I found gh packages very hard to work with. Using regular gh git repo as maven repo is much easier.

[hfhbd]

Why? It is a normal maven repo, only password protected.

[Big Chungus]

Well it doesn't allow overriding stuff and has no staging mechanism, so if something goes wrong when publishing all mpp artefacts, you are left with either manually removing all partial artefacts or incrementing version before trying again

[Big Chungus]

And i had occasional network errors when uploading from gh actions, which effectively invalidated my entire version, even if some artefacts did upload...