The Gradle application plugin extends the language plugins with common application related tasks. It allows running and bundling applications for the jvm.
To use the application plugin, include in your build script:
To define the main-class for the application you have to set the mainClassName
property as shown below
Example 33.2. Configure the application main class
build.gradle
mainClassName = "org.gradle.sample.Main"
Then, you can run the application by running gradle run
. Gradle will take care of building the application classes,
along with their runtime dependencies, and starting the application with the correct classpath.
The plugin can also build a distribution for your application. The distribution will package up the runtime dependencies of the application
along with some OS specific start scripts. You can run gradle install
to create an image of the application in
build/install/
. You can run projectName
gradle distZip
to create a
ZIP containing the distribution.
The Application plugin adds the following tasks to the project.
Table 33.1. Application plugin - tasks
Task name | Depends on | Type | Description |
run
|
classes
|
JavaExec |
Starts the application. |
startScripts
|
jar
|
CreateStartScripts |
Creates OS specific scripts to run the project as a JVM application. |
install
|
jar , startScripts
|
Sync |
Installs the application into a specified directory. |
distZip
|
jar , startScripts
|
Zip |
Creates a full distribution ZIP archive including runtime libraries and OS specific scripts. |
The application plugin adds some properties to the project, which you can use to configure its behaviour. See Project
.