How to publish android library on github containing private dependencies

Issue

My job is to develop an android library (my first library ever) to be used by other company's applications. Thing is, I need to use dependencies from a third-party provider who keeps them private (I need to set credentials in the build.gradle file to be able to download them), and the team of our first consuming appliciation told us they were getting errors about that (they could't find said dependencies). We downloaded them from our provider and uploaded them (2GB worth) to nexus as a quick fix and it worked.

Thing is, the company has decided to move from self-hosted gitlab/nexus to cloud github. They have set an organization and we (developers) are included in it.

I've created my own repo, uploaded our last version and created the script to publish our library. I see the same files I used to upload to nexus on the github repository. I tell the guys of the consuming application to give it a test and they say they find the same errors: they cannot find provider's private dependencies.

At this point I don't know what to do.

• Find the dependencies and upload them to github? This has two issues. First, I don't know how to upload these dependencies, since they don´t belong to any repository I own in github. Second, we'd need to do this every single time the provider launched a release, to keep the dependencies up-to-date.
• Get the provider to make their dependencies public? IDK if they'll accept this, nor if this would be enough to fix our problem. Should the consumng application state on their build.gradle the origin (urls) of my dependencies or should the pom file already contain everything? I thought it would be the latter, but this issue proved me wrong.

The situation is specific enough for me not to be able to find anything about it on the github docs. Has anyone encountered a similar issue?

Solution

There´s this plugin I found that easily allow a building a fat aar: https://github.com/kezong/fat-aar-android

Answered By - Frank