How do I publish a grails 3 plugin to my local nexus repo?

I figured it out with help from Ryan Vanderwerf at http://rvanderwerf.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-to-publish-grails-3-plugin.html who writes that there are a bunch of spring-boot dependencies that don't have versions in them and that causes gradle to freak out. To workaround it, strip out all dependencies in the pom that doesn't have versions:

publishing {
    publications {
        mavenJar(MavenPublication) {
            pom.withXml {
                def pomNode = asNode()
                pomNode.dependencyManagement.replaceNode {}

                // simply remove dependencies without a version
                // version-less dependencies are handled with dependencyManagement
                // see https://github.com/spring-gradle-plugins/dependency-management-plugin/issues/8 for more complete solutions
                pomNode.dependencies.dependency.findAll {
                    it.version.text().isEmpty()
                }.each {
                    it.replaceNode {}
                }
            }
            from components.java
        }
    }
    repositories {
        maven {
            credentials {
                username "username"
                password "password"
            }
            url "http://localhost/repo"
        }
    }
}

then you can use grails publish-plugin or gradle publish to publish your plugin

related SO question: Grails 3 - How to publish to Artifactory