Conventional way of copying files in Gradle - use Copy task or copy method?

Question

I'm adding a task to deploy war files to Tomcat .. the only thing that the task needs to do is copy the war file to the TOMCAT location.

There 2 ways that I can think of implementing this .. but being new to gradle, I'm not quite sure what's more conventional/right (or if it even matters).

task myCopy(type: Copy)      myCopy.configure {        from('source')        into('target')        include('*.war')     } 

or

task myCopy{   doLast{      copy {        from 'source'        into 'target'        include '*.war'      }      }  } 

Answer 1

In most cases (including this one), the Copy task is the better choice. Among other things, it will give you automatic up-to-date checking. The copy method is meant for situations where (for some reason) you have to bolt on to an existing task and cannot use a separate task for copying.

The code for your Copy task can be simplified to:

task myCopy(type: Copy) {     from('source')     into('target')     include('*.war') }