Grails Engineering Meeting Notes (02 11 2021)

Date: 02/11/2021

Attendees

• Puneet Behl
• James Kleeh
• Zachary Klein
• Graeme Rocher
• Jason Schindler
• Bobby Warner

Agenda

• Current Development Activities
• JFrog Discontinuation of JCenter and Bintray
• Open Discussion

Current Development Activities

Zachary

• Began working on a replacement for the Bintray API
• Wrote a Micronaut service with a persistence layer
  • Did a little bit of refactoring on the Grails app but trying to make few changes
• Need to add an admin portal
• Graeme: Is the database relational? Where will it be hosted?
  • Jason: We have an AWS environment for Grails, we would probably put it there
  • Graeme: One thought I had was to host a JSON file in GitHub and then people can do PRs to it to do updates
  • James: That was something that was talked about as an option. This would put it on the plugin author to do a second PR to get their contact updated
  • Graeme: Just an idea to make something that doesn't require another database
  • Zachary: How should we update this?
  • Puneet: It could be from PRs by the author
  • James: You could do it with a cron in GitHub actions
  • Bobby: I think I agree having the super-simple file would be preferred. I also don't think there is a large volume of plugins being released
  • James: I think it is normal to have 5 new plugin releases in a week
  • Jason: OK, that sounds like a decision
  • James: I think it would be a good idea to do a POC GitHub Cron job

Puneet

• Working on package migration from Bintray to Artifactory
  • Puneet: I've been trying to find a way to export everything from the Bintray repo and can't find something that provides more than one file at a time
  • Graeme: One option is to reach out to the JFrog people to request help for that
  • James: Are we able to get a list of all the artifacts with the Bintray API?
  • Puneet: Allow me to share my screen
  • Puneet demonstrated what he has been able to discover from the Bintray API

JFrog Discontinuation of JCenter and Bintray

• Jason: We need to determine what our recommendation will be for plugin authors
• Jason: In the chat channel we have been discussing suggesting Maven Central
• Graeme: Another option is GitHub packages
• Puneet: A limitation of GitHub packages is that every release needs a repository
• Jason: We had discussed giving them access to Artifactory
• James: I don't think allowing them to publish directly to repo.grails.org is an option
• Jason: Right, it would introduce a lot of management overhead for user accounts and permissions
• James: It also makes us more attached in the long term to Artifactory
• Puneet: I'm also a little hesitant continuing with repo.grails.org as a longer term solution
• Puneet: Long term, Maven Central seems like the best option
• Jason: Just because we suggest that, that doesn't mean that they can't choose to publish elsewhere
• Jason: David also shared in chat that he felt the domain ownership requirement was a lot to put on plugin authors, but according to the Maven Central documentation, you can use your GitHub account to claim a Group.
• Graeme: I've seen groups associated with GitHub accounts before.
• Puneet: We will write something up in a blog post with options and give a preference to Maven Central
• Jason: James said there was a Gradle plugin that folks are using to publish
• James: Graeme, do you know offhand if the gradle plugin can be modified to say where it will publish to?
• Graeme: I don't remember. I believe it just configures the gradle plugin stuff I don't think it does anything special
• James: How does it know to publish to Bintray as a default
• Graeme: It extends from the Bintray plugin
• James: So I guess the question is should we update that plugin for people to use or should we suggest that they use something else
• Bobby: We should direct them towards the standard maven plugins

Next Steps

• Jason: These seem to be the next steps
  • Migrate existing artifacts out of Bintray and into Artifactory
  • Publish blog post with steps and advice for plugin authors
  • Put together public repository to support Grails Plugin portal
  • Modify Plugin Portal to stop using Bintray API