Does the Portal support SNAPSHOT releases?

Question

Does the Central Portal support -SNAPSHOT releases?

Answer

Historically, users have been able to publish -SNAPSHOT releases to OSSRH (but not to Maven Central). The intention of this was to allow users to verify their own releases prior to publishing to Maven Central, but it has the side effect of users being able to make their pre-release versions available to their communities during ongoing development.

The Central Publisher Portal supports -SNAPSHOT releases, but the deployment process is slightly different than for the broadly available, final version releases that end up on Maven Central. Deploying -SNAPSHOT releases will result in a version cannot be a SNAPSHOT error in the validation results. Please see our -SNAPSHOT publishing documentation for more information.

The Portal also supports a more limited feature that is intended to fill the original need for publishers to be able to perform manual verification of their builds. Publishers will be able to point their build configurations to either specific deployments or any VALIDATED deployment that they published in order to use the component before publishing. This will be particularly useful for publishers who publish via CI pipelines, but want to verify locally.