Gradle Application Plugin

External

• https://docs.gradle.org/4.7/userguide/application_plugin.html

Internal

• Gradle Concepts
• Gradle Distribution Plugin

Overview

The application plugin facilitates creating an executable JVM application. It bundles all application JARS, transitive dependencies and operating system specific scripts into a TAR or ZIP file, and it also generates the bash and Windows wrapper scripts to run the application with.

Typical Setup

This setup describes configuration of a multi-project build, whose sub-project create various components of the application and the top level project bundles all those in a distributable artifact. The dependencies between the sub-projects must be configured in the corresponding build.gradle files. To build the application artifact, we assume that there's a sub-project that contains the "main()" static method that triggers the execution, that method exists in "io.example.Main" class, and the sub-project in question is named "main".

As such, the top-level project build.gradle should contain the following relevant configuration:

...

apply plugin: 'application'

mainClassName = "io.example.Main"

dependencies {

    ...

    implementation project(':main')
}

Provided that the rest of the dependencies between sub-projects are correctly declared in the corresponding build.gradle files, the execution of

gradle distZip

will compile everything and will create a ./build/distributions/<rootProject.name>.zip file. The file includes the sub-project artifacts, their transitive dependencies, and wrapper scripts for bash and Windows.

For more details about rootProject.name, see:

Properties

mainClassName

mainClassName = 'greeter.Greeter'