Host Your Maven Artifacts Using Amazon S3

If you use Amazon Web Services and you use Java for your projects, then Amazon S3 is a great place to host your team's artifacts.

It is easy to setup and pretty cheap. Also, it is much simpler than setting one of the existing repository options (JFrog, Nexus, Archiva, etc.) if you are not particularly interested in their features.

To get started you need to specify a Maven wagon which supports S3.
We will use the S3 storage wagon.

Let’s get started by creating a Maven project.

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId=com.test.apps -DartifactId=S3WaggonTest -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart -DinteractiveMode=false

We are going to add a simple service.

package com.test.apps;

public class HelloService {

    public String sayHello() {

        return "Hello";
    }
}

Then we are going to add the Maven wagon which will upload and fetch our binaries to S3.

<build>
    <extensions>
        <extension>
            <groupId>com.gkatzioura.maven.cloud</groupId>
            <artifactId>s3-storage-wagon</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
        </extension>
    </extensions>
</build>

Then we shall create the S3 bucket that will host our artifacts.

aws s3 createbucket artifactbucket

Now we have to create our bucket. Then we shall set the distribution management on our Maven project.

<distributionManagement>
    <snapshotRepository>
        <id>my-repo-bucket-snapshot</id>
        <url>s3://my-test-repo/snapshot</url>
    </snapshotRepository>
    <repository>
        <id>my-repo-bucket-release</id>
        <url>s3://my-test-repo/release</url>
    </repository>
</distributionManagement>

From the Maven documentation:

Whereas the repositories element specifies in the POM the location and manner in which Maven may download remote artifacts for use by the current project, distributionManagement specifies where (and how) this project will get to a remote repository when it is deployed. The repository elements will be used for snapshot distribution if the snapshotRepository is not defined.

The next step is the most crucial and this has to to do with authenticating to AWS. The easy way is to have AWS CLI configured to point to the region where your bucket is located and with credentials which have read and write access to the s3 bucket which will host your binaries.

aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
Default region name [None]: us-west-2
Default output format [None]: json

The other way is to use the Maven way and specify our AWS credentials on the ~/.m2/settings.xml

<servers>
  <server>
    <id>my-repo-bucket-snapshot</id>
    <username>EXAMPLEEXAMPLEXAMPLE</username>
    <password>eXampLEkeyEMI/K7EXAMP/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY</password>
  </server>
  <server>
    <id>my-repo-bucket-release</id>
    <username>EXAMPLEEXAMPLEXAMPLE</username>
    <password>eXampLEkeyEMI/K7EXAMP/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY</password>
  </server>
</servers>

Be aware that you have to specify credentials for each repository specified. We are not done yet, as it is crucial to specify the region of the bucket.

To do so, you can either set it up the Amazon way, thereby specifying it in an environmental variable:

AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1

Or you can pass it as a property while executing the deploy command.

-DAWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1

And now the easiest part, which is deploying.

mvn deploy

Now since your artifact has been deployed you can use it in another repo by specifying your repository and your wagon.

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>my-repo-bucket-snapshot</id>
        <url>s3://my-test-repo/snapshot</url>
    </repository>
    <repository>
        <id>my-repo-bucket-release</id>
        <url>s3://my-test-repo/release</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

<build>
    <extensions>
        <extension>
            <groupId>com.gkatzioura.maven.cloud</groupId>
            <artifactId>s3-storage-wagon</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
        </extension>
    </extensions>
</build>

That’s it! Next thing you know your artifact will be downloaded by Maven through S3 and used as a dependency in your new project.