Gradle - Delete not working

Question

I want to append some extra delete functionality to the clean task (for Java builds).

So I try adding the following to my gradle build script.

clean.doLast{
    delete ('test.txt')
}

When I tun the "clean" task my sample file doesn't get deleted ... I also don't get any error message indicated what happened.

If I try the following:

task deleteStuff(type: Delete) {
    delete 'test.txt'
}

Things do work.

Can I not add (via doLast) delete functionality to tasks? What is the proper way of doing this (without hacking in Ant tasks).

Answer 1

In these two code snippets, you aren't calling Project.delete() but Delete.delete(). In other words, you are configuring the Delete task. Doing this after the Delete task has executed (as in the first snippet) is too late.

In the case of a Delete task, there is no good reason to add a delete operation with doLast. Your second snippet is clearly preferable. For other tasks, the doLast approach will work because they don't have a delete method. Or you can disambiguate with project.delete().

Answer 2

If the reason is to avoid spending time in the preparation phase (which is executed for every task), doFirst can be used to set up the Delete-task. So using clean.doFirst instead of clean.doLast in the example above will work.