Understanding Gradle's mavenDeployer

Question

I'm a newbie in Gradle and Groovy in general, and I'm trying to understand the following example from the Gradle user guide, and especially how I could find, in the DSL documentation, where all these options can be found:

uploadArchives {
    repositories.mavenDeployer {
        name = 'sshDeployer' // optional
        configuration = configurations.deployerJars
        repository(url: "scp://repos.mycompany.com/releases") {
            authentication(userName: "me", password: "myPassword")
        }
    }
}

What I understand:

• uploadArchives is a task of type Upload, added to the project by the Java plugin
• repositories is a property of the Upload task, of type RepositoryHandler

What I don't understand:

• mavenDeployer doesn't appear anywhere in the documentation of RepositoryHandler. Where does it come from? How are we supposed to know that such a method exists?
• Searching in the index, I find that mavenDeployer is a method from MavenRepositoryHandlerConvention which is mixed in the RepositoryHandler associated with each task of type Upload. Too bad this isn't mentioned in RepositoryHandler's documentation and Upload's documentation.

• Although it could be clearer, I understand that the closure must configure an object of type GroovyMavenDeployer. But reading the javadoc, the repository property for example is of type Object. How can I know that I can configure it using the following?

  repository(url: "scp://repos.mycompany.com/releases") {
      authentication(userName: "me", password: "myPassword")
  }
  

Answer 1

Gradle DSL documentation is not especially comprehensive. It's not always clear where public api stops and private impl starts & often the source code is the only place to get a comprehensive view (so I find it is generally easiest to link the src code to my IDE).

In your specific case, the userguide + the source code is the best way to navigate.

EDIT: this answer refers to an old version of gradle so the userguide link above points to that old version, current day (v7.4.2 at the time of writing) gradle uses a different plugin which is described in https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/userguide_single.html#publishing_maven