Force Gradle to run task even if it is UP-TO-DATE

Question

I came across a situation, when everything is UP-TO-DATE for Gradle, although I'd still like it to run the task for me. Obviously it does not:

gradle test :compileJava UP-TO-DATE :processResources UP-TO-DATE :classes UP-TO-DATE :compileTestJava UP-TO-DATE :processTestResources UP-TO-DATE :testClasses UP-TO-DATE :test UP-TO-DATE  BUILD SUCCESSFUL  Total time: 0.833 secs 

I can force it to run test by running clean test, although this may be considered an overhead in some cases. Is there a way to force task execution no matter if Gradle believes it's UP-TO-DATE or not?

Answer 1

If you want to rerun all tasks, you can use command line parameter --rerun-tasks. However this is basically the same as doing a clean as it reruns all the tasks.

If you want to run a single task every time, then you can specify that it is never up-to-date:

mytask {     outputs.upToDateWhen { false } } 

If you want to rerun a single task once and leave all the other tasks, you have to implement a bit of logic:

mytask {      outputs.upToDateWhen {          if (project.hasProperty('rerun')) {             println "rerun!"             return false         } else {             return true         }     } } 

And then you can force the task to be re-run by using:

gradle mytask -Prerun

Note that this will also re-run all the tasks that depend on mytask.