In order to deploy our artifacts to JCenter, we use the Bintray Gradle plugin. This plugin adds extra functionality to our project to publish our artifacts.

Let's continue with our example build file from the previous project. The build file is for a Java project with some code. We will use the publishing plugin to define our publications or artifacts for the project. We will now add the Gradle plugin to the project by using the buildscript configuration block. In the next example build file, we will apply the Bintray plugin to our project. The following code shows this:

// Define Bintray plugin.
buildscript {
  repositories {
    jcenter()
  }

  dependencies {
    classpath 'com.jfrog.bintray.gradle:gradle-bintray-plugin:1.1
  }
}

// Apply plugin to project.
apply plugin: 'com.jfrog.bintray'

apply plugin: 'maven-publish'
apply plugin: 'java'

version = '1.0.RELEASE'
group = 'book.gradle'

repositories {
  jcenter()
}

dependencies {
  compile 'org.springframework:spring-context:4.1.4.RELEASE'
}

publishing {
  publications {
    sample(MavenPublication) {
      from components.java
    }
  }
}

Since the release of Gradle 2.1, we use an alternative syntax to include an external plugin in our build script. The new syntax works for plugins that are deployed to the Gradle plugin portal. The feature is incubating, which means it can change in the future. Also, an important restriction is that the new syntax is not supported in the subprojects and allprojects configuration blocks. In the following example build file, the new syntax to add a plugin is used:

// Define and apply Bintray plugin.
plugins {
  id 'com.jfrog.bintray' version '1.0'
}

With the new plugin in our project, we can run the tasks command to see which tasks have been added by the plugin:

$ gradle tasks
...
Publishing tasks
----------------
bintrayUpload - Publishes artifacts to bintray.com.
...

We notice the bintrayUpload task that has been added by the plugin to our project.