# Gradle Plugin Resolution Outage Postmortem

DevFeed: [Gradle Plugin Resolution Outage Postmortem](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/gradle-plugin-resolution-outage-postmortem-24680.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.gradle.org/plugins-jcenter>)

Author: Louis Jacomet

Published: 2022-01-20T05:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The Gradle Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-gradle-blog.md>)

Topics: [Gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/gradle.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [Maven](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/maven.md>)

Tags: [build](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/build.md>), [dependencies](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/dependencies.md>), [gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gradle.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [maven-central](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/maven-central.md>), [mirror](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mirror.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [plugin](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/plugin.md>)

## AI overview

This postmortem examines the January 12, 2022 outage that disrupted Gradle Plugin Portal plugin resolution because of its dependency on JCenter. It presents the incident timeline, the effects on builds, the fixes deployed, and measures to reduce reliance on JCenter, including repository content filtering, metadata sources, an internal mirror, and Maven Central.

## Source excerpt

On January 12th 2022, Gradle users were experiencing issues resolving plugins from the Gradle Plugin Portal because of the outage of JCenter that the Plugin Portal depends on for some of the functionality. This postmortem gives a timeline of the outage, describes the effect on Gradle users, and what actions were taken to further reduce the Gradle Plugin Portal's reliance on JCenter. Finally, we will also discuss how you can protect your build against such outages. Users affected by JCenter outages for project dependencies should also refer to our original blog post about the shutdown of JCenter. Outage timeline 4.30pm UTC, January 12th Outage begins Gradle users start noticing that plugin resolution is failing in builds. 4.56pm UTC, January 12th Incident opened The outage is acknowledged on the Gradle status page. 6pm UTC, January 12th We identify a hotfix that will allow the Gradle Plugin Portal to ignore 5xx error codes from JCenter and resolve plugins it hosts entirely. However, the hotfix cannot be built and deployed immediately because building the Plugin Portal code requires resolving some plugins from the Plugin Portal itself and JCenter, which failed. 8.44pm UTC, January 12th First fix is deployed We update the build of the Plugin Portal to not rely on JCenter at all by using repository content filtering and supported metadata sources. The first fix is deployed. 8.58pm UTC, January 12th Second fix is deployed The first fix turns out to be insufficient. We develop and deploy a second fix that allows us to change the repository to which the Plugin Portal redirects. We configure the Plugin Portal to use our internal mirror of JCenter. 9.43pm UTC, January 12th Outage is resolved The existing mirror is too sparsely populated as it was not used much, which means most builds still fail to resolve plugins. We update the mirror repository to redirect to Maven Central as well. This results in most dependencies being properly resolved and unblocked most builds. Plugins