trouble publishing my first artifact on gradle - gradle

Question

I am having trouble pushing my first build to gradle to a remote server on nexus. The build was successful but when i use ./gradlew publish no jar files are pushed to the repo.
below is my build code
plugins {
id 'java'
id 'org.springframework.boot' version '2.2.2.RELEASE'
id 'io.spring.dependency-management' version '1.0.8.RELEASE'
}
group 'com.example'
version '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
sourceCompatibility = 1.8
apply plugin: 'maven-publish'
publishing {
publications {
maven(MavenPublication) {
artifact("build/libs/my-app-$version"+".jar") {
extension 'jar'
}}
}
}
repositories {
maven {
name 'nexus'
url "http://159.65.23.158:8081/repository/maven-snapshots/"
credentials {
username project.repoUser
password project.repoPassword
}
}
}
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web'
implementation group: 'net.logstash.logback', name: 'logstash-logback-encoder', version: '5.2'
testImplementation group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.12'
}
When I entered the ./gradlew publish it performs the same as the ./gradlew build command. I have checked the nexus repo and no files have been pushed to my repo. I am doing a bootcamp by Nana Janashia and I have followed step by step and cannot figure where i am going wrong?

Answer 1

It looks like the publishing task does not depend on the jar task, so no jar has been produced to get picked up from the libs folder. You can confirm this by running ./gradlew publish --dry-run to see what tasks are running.
To fix this, I suggest you pass the appropriate jar task to the artifact method instead of the raw path to the jar, viz:
publishing {
publications {
maven(MavenPublication) {
artifact(tasks.named(sourceSets.main.jarTaskName)) {
extension 'jar'
}
}
}
}
Passing the task gives Gradle the information it needs to run the right tasks in the right order.