Gradle distribution - create an empty directory

Question

Is there a way to add empty directories (e.g, "logs") when creating a distribution with the gradle distribution plugin?

I saw this JIRA, describing the exact same thing. It is still open https://issues.gradle.org/browse/GRADLE-1671

I wonder if there are any workarounds I can use. I don't quite understand the workarounds described in the jira.

Thank you.

Answer 1

So I managed to work around this by following the suggestion in the mentioned JIRA to create a dummy empty directory and then copy it to the distribution location.

It's ugly but works. I'm sure it can be written more efficiently though. This is the Copy block from inside distributions/main/contents:

into('') {
    //create an empty 'logs' directory in distribution root
    def logDirBase = new File('/tmp/app-dummy-dir')
    logDirBase.mkdirs()
    def logDir = new File(logDirBase.absolutePath + '/logs')
    logDir.mkdirs()

    from {logDirBase}
}

Answer 2

Based on Logato's own answer I've come up with the following code, which is more elegant and also closes the file pointer correctly (using the with context):

distributions {
    main {
        baseName = 'app'
        contents {
            into('') {
                File.createTempDir().with {
                    def tmpLog = new File(absolutePath, 'logs')
                    println tmpLog.absolutePath
                    tmpLog.mkdirs()
                    from (absolutePath) {
                        includeEmptyDirs = true
                    }
                }
                // ...
            }
            // ...
        }
    }
}