Fantastic, really excited about this! 🎉 I recently did something like this on a different closed-source projects. One of things I found useful to do prior to merging was temporarily adding a step to the PR pipeline with the gradle task publishToMavenLocal to make sure I pulled in all of the signing key properties were correct and produced a valid signature. Additionally, to prevent some issues popping up when we go to release this next, we could test the publish task in GHA by simply publishing to a staging repo, but without the closeAndReleaseRepository task. When we've verified it works properly, we can simply manually drop the staging repo in nexus and remove the steps used to test the publish workflow. ultimately, nothing will perfectly test publishing until we actually publish, but I think doing something like I described would help us reduce risk.

Nit: could you also update the badge in the README to point to GHA rather than CircleCI? Additionally, I believe the bullet points describing how to add an SSH key for CircleCI in RELEASE.md#Configuration are no longer necessary and can be deleted. Mainly, I'm just looking to cleanup references to CircleCI.

I will update docs, however I don't have the secrets for the local dry run. Would you like to try it yourself?

I will update docs, however I don't have the secrets for the local dry run. Would you like to try it yourself?

I don't think I'll have the time to get to it today, and I wrote this suggestion before seeing your message about cutting a patch release to test it out, that's probably a better way to go! Thanks for the PR 😃

I will merge, cut the release, and hope 😅