Making JavaDocs available with GitHub, Sonatype Maven repo

Question

Although Github provides a nice home for Java open source projects, there are some things that are still missing compared to more mature open source hosting places. I have so far figured out that Sonatype offers Maven repository access for open source projects, which solves one issue; and there are many solutions for user/dev mailing lists.

But one thing I am now trying to resolve is that of publishing automatically generated javadocs for online browsing. Although publishing source jars via Maven helps a bit with IDEs, I still like ability to browse javadocs online without downloading or importing a project. Does anyone know of a good way to achieve this, for projects hosted at Github? (need not be something Github offers, but ideally something that can be automated to happen when release is cut)

Answer 1

GitHub serves static HTML files that are in the gh-pages branch of your repo at http://your_username.github.com/your_repo/. In theory, Maven could be made to do the following:

1. Commit the release pom.xml.
2. Generate the JavaDocs to a .gitignore'd directory (so it would be preserved across branch changes).
3. Checkout the gh-pages branch.
4. Replace all of the files in the working directory with that of the directory the JavaDocs were copied to
5. Commit
6. Checkout the original branch.
7. Continue with release...

I'm only two days in to using Maven for a few of my projects so this is way beyond my capabilities. I'd be eager to see this implemented either with existing plugins or a custom plugin.