Chapter 21. The War Plugin

The War plugin adds the following tasks to the project.

The War plugin adds the following dependencies to tasks added by the Java plugin.

Figure 21.1. War plugin - tasks

The War plugin adds two dependency configurations: providedCompile and providedRuntime. Those configurations have the same scope as the respective compile and runtime configurations, except that they are not added to the WAR archive. It is important to note that those provided configurations work transitively. Let's say you add commons-httpclient:commons-httpclient:3.0 to any of the provided configurations. This dependency has a dependency on commons-codec. This means neither httpclient nor commons-codec is added to your WAR, even if commons-codec were an explicit dependency of your compile configuration. If you don't want this transitive behavior, simply declare your provided dependencies like commons-httpclient:commons-httpclient:3.0@jar.

These properties are provided by a WarPluginConvention convention object.

The default behavior of the War task is to copy the content of src/main/webapp to the root of the archive. Your webapp folder may of course contain a WEB-INF sub-directory, which again may contain a web.xml file. Your compiled classes are compiled to WEB-INF/classes. All the dependencies of the runtime ^[18] configuration are copied to WEB-INF/lib.

Have also a look at War .

Here is an example with the most important customization options:

import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.GetMethod

group = 'gradle'
version = '1.0'
usePlugin('war')
usePlugin('jetty')

configurations {
   moreLibs
}

repositories {
   flatDir(dirs: "$rootDir/lib")
   mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    compile ":compile:1.0"
    providedCompile ":providedCompile:1.0@jar", "javax.servlet:servlet-api:2.5"
    runtime ":runtime:1.0"
    providedRuntime ":providedRuntime:1.0@jar"
    testCompile "junit:junit:3.8.2"
    moreLibs ":otherLib:1.0"
}

war {
    fileSet(dir: file('src/rootContent')) // adds a file-set to the root of the archive
    webInf(dir: file('src/additionalWebInf')) // adds a file-set to the WEB-INF dir.
    additionalLibs(dir: file('additionalLibs')) // adds a file-set to the WEB-INF/lib dir.
    libConfigurations('moreLibs') // adds a configuration to the WEB-INF/lib dir.
    webXml = file('src/someWeb.xml') // copies a file to WEB-INF/web.xml
}

jar.enabled = true

[jettyRun, jettyRunWar]*.daemon = true
stopKey = 'foo'
stopPort = 9451
httpPort = 8163

task runTest(dependsOn: jettyRun) << {
    callServlet()
}

task runWarTest(dependsOn: jettyRunWar) << {
    callServlet()
}

private void callServlet() {
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient()
    GetMethod method = new GetMethod("http://localhost:$httpPort/customised/hello")
    client.executeMethod(method)
    new File(buildDir, "servlet-out.txt").write(method.getResponseBodyAsString())
    jettyStop.execute()
}

Of course one can configure the different file-sets with a closure to define excludes and includes.

If you want to enable the generation of the default jar archive additional to the war archive just type:

jar.enabled = true

EclipseWtp has a default instance with the name eclipseWtp. It generates a .settings/org.eclipse.wst.common.component file.