How to publish a Gradle shadow jar without a shadow pom

Question

I use the shadow jar plugin (https://github.com/johnrengelman/shadow) to create an extra jar file with all my dependencies packaged inside. I also would like to keep the default generated jar that has only my code & resources. This is pretty simple and straightforward until it comes to publishing the jars.

As my shadow jar has all its deps inside, its pom file is not a priority for me in terms of publishing. However if I follow the instructions laid out in the shadowJar plugin documentation (https://imperceptiblethoughts.com/shadow/publishing/#publishing-with-maven-publish-plugin)

publishing {
  publications {
    shadow(MavenPublication) { publication ->
      project.shadow.component(publication)
    }
  }

I end up with two different pom files (one for the regular jar file and one for the shadow jar) published to the same URL with one overriding the other. This behavior causes customers to download the default jar but without any dependencies in the pom file.

I tried many ways to disable shadowJar pom file but without any success. How do I get it to work?

Answer 1

Eventually I just ignored the instructions in the plugin's documentation and published the shadow jar just like I publish my sources jar:

Simplest way to do this for a single project is:

publishing {
    publications {
        Library(MavenPublication) {
            from project.components.java
            artifact tasks.sourceJar
            artifact tasks.shadowJar
        }
    }
}

If you have multiple projects (not all having shadowJar plugin applied) and want to add this logic in the root project, you can do this:

subprojects {
    afterEvaluate {
        publishing {
            publications {
                Library(MavenPublication) {
                    from project.components.java
                    artifact tasks.sourceJar
                    if (project.tasks.findByName("shadowJar") != null) {
                        artifact tasks.shadowJar
                    }
                }
            }
        }        
    }
}