Provide an easy way to create only one repo when using multiple machines

[JavierSegoviaCordoba]

Use case

A Kotlin Multiplatform library needs two machines to generate all artifacts, Windows and macOS, so providing a way to use the same repository should be great to let us close/release that repository via CLI.

What I want to do

Using GitHub Actions with a matrix of Windows and macOS, the workflow should do:

1. A job that creates the repository.
2. A job that depends on the previous job and retrieves that repository, allowing publishing on it.
3. A job that depends on o the previous job and let us close/release that repository.

[JavierSegoviaCordoba]

Related: #19

[vlsi]

It might be fun if "1" was not needed:

2. macOS job creates a repository, Windows waits for the repository to appear and publishes there (e.g. it might search for a repository with sha=... comment).

[JavierSegoviaCordoba]

Should be interesting but for open source projects. But for private repositories one machine we will be spending minutes doing "nothing"

[vlsi]

That is not minutes. "initialize staging repository" could easily be one of the first actions, so wait time would be close to zero.
Otherwise, spawning a job for the sake of "initialize repository only" looks like a significant overhead.

[martinbonnin]

Tentative API:

nexusPublishing {
    repositories {
        sonatype {
            username = "your-username"
            password = "your-password"

            // Will wait for a repository with the given "description" to come online before publishing
            selectRepository(pollingIntervalMillis = 10000) { 
               // here this is an instance of some NexusRepository class with id and description fields
               // this lambda gets called every 10s with the existing repositories 
               // if it returns true, publishing will start with the given one
               if (description == githubRunId) {
                 // select this repository
                 true
               } else {
                 // This lambda return style might be too Kotlin specific so maybe make something more Groovy-comatible?
                 false
               }
            }

            // Also provide an API to force a repository id and avoid looking up the repositories
            // For an example created by https://github.com/nexus-actions/create-nexus-staging-repo
            repositoryId.set("someExternalRespositoryId")
        }
    }
}

[ViliusSutkus89]

Functionality described by @JavierSegoviaCordoba is already available. Thank you devs! I'm pretty sure this is answered in other issues, but I found myself here, somehow, others might come here too, so I'll just share how it works for me.

release.yml implements (with a lot of extra stuff) a GitHub Actions workflow that is executed in 3 jobs (each of them is a separate VM):

1. ./gradlew initializeSonatypeStagingRepository -PrepoDescription=${{ github.run_id }}-${{ github.run_attempt }}
2. Matrix with a bunch of ./gradlew findSonatypeStagingRepository -x initializeSonatypeStagingRepository publishToMavenLocal -PrepoDescription=${{ github.run_id }}-${{ github.run_attempt }}'s
3. ./gradlew findSonatypeStagingRepository -x initializeSonatypeStagingRepository closeSonatypeStagingRepository -PrepoDescription=${{ github.run_id }}-${{ github.run_attempt }}

All jobs from the same run share the same repository description. It doesn't even have to be the same workflow, if you can share repository description string somehow. Repository description is supplied to publish-plugins using this code:

nexusPublishing {
    project.findProperty("repoDescription")?.toString()?.let {
        if (it.isNotEmpty()) {
            repositoryDescription.set(it)
        }
    }
    repositories {
        sonatype()
    }
}

Sample run using the workflow