Gradle Artifacts

Internal

• Gradle Concepts
• Gradle Artifact Publishing Concepts

Overview

A Gradle project may produce zero, one or more artifacts. An artifact may be built locally by a plugin such as the Application plugin, which in turn delegates the artifact building part to Distribution plugin, or by other plugins. The artifact building plugins create the artifact locally, in the project build area. This article describes the process of configuring and executing the artifact generation. For details on how the artifacts can be published, see:

Gradle Artifact Publishing Concepts

Artifact

A Gradle artifact is a file the project builds and shares with the outside world.

Typical artifacts:

• A library JAR that includes the functionality exposed by the Java project. Additionally, the project may produce companion JARs that bundle the source files.
• An executable JVM application that bundles all application JARS, transitive dependencies, the bash wrapper scripts and other operating system specific scripts into a ZIP file. This type of artifact is produced by the Application plugin in cooperation with the Distribution plugin.
• A Docker image that is assembled by the project then pushed into a repository.

Artifact Plugins

• Application Plugin
• Distribution Plugin