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 does not currently support -SNAPSHOT releases, and deployments of -SNAPSHOT releases will have a version cannot be a SNAPSHOT error in their validation results. Versions should only be published to the Portal if they are intended to reach Maven Central.

The Portal 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.

As we have gotten a significant amount of feedback from our publishers, we are including -SNAPSHOT functionality in the Central Portal roadmap. At this time, we do not have an estimated availability date.

Alternative Options

If you are looking for a solution that is able to handle -SNAPSHOT releases for your project, consider Sonatype Nexus Repository which supports maven-snapshots as a repository out of the box.