A week ago I noticed that our Android builds were failing in the pipeline, the logs stated that it failed to download a couple of dependencies from JCenter with 502s, so I thought “no worries, I’ll just re-run the pipeline and it’ll get fixed!” Nope! The JCenter server was down for a while, so I decided to do some googleing and found out that JFrog had deprecated Bintray and JCenter earlier this year .
After a while everything was back to normal, but it was clear we had to stop using JCenter and use mavenCentral. This should have been an easy change, but it wasn’t. The main dependency in our app is a closed source library that is exclusively published on JCenter by a trusted (but with bad dev support) third-party. So we couldn’t just pull it from Github and use it as a submodule or something like that, we had to use a different approach.
Of course we count on the publisher to migrate to mavenCentral some time in the future, but in the meantime we’ll have this plan B ready to deploy whenever things go south (which for a service that’s getting deprecated might be more often than usual).
Presenting the plan B: scrape the entire maven directory off JCenter for this dependency.
Step 1
Use wget to download everything from JCenter
1 mkdir localmaven && cd localmaven
2 wget --recursive -np -nH -e robots=off -l5 http://jcenter.bintray.com/com/thevendorname/
Step 2
Add your local maven repo to your build.gradle
Under allprojects -> repositories add the following (in the last position):
maven { url rootProject.rootDir.getAbsolutePath() + "/localmaven" }
Step 3
Remove jcenter (optional)
Given that the libraries on JCenter won’t receive any more updates, you can safely remove it from your build.gradle once you’ve made a copy of all the required dependencies.