Gradle equivalent to Maven's "copy-dependencies"?

Question

In Maven-land, anytime I want to simply pull down the transitive dependencies for a particular POM file, I just open a shell, navigate to where the POM is located, and run:

mvn dependency:copy-dependencies

And boom, Maven creates a target/ directory inside the current one and places all the transitively-fetched JARs to that location.

I am now trying to make the switch over to Gradle, but Gradle doesn't seem to have the same feature. So I ask: Does Gradle have an equivalent to Maven's copy-dependencies? If so, can someone provide an example? If not, would other devs find this to be a worthwhile contribution to the Gradle community?

Answer 1

There's no equivalent of copy-dependencies in gradle but here's a task that does it:

apply plugin: 'java'

repositories {
   mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
   compile 'com.google.inject:guice:4.0-beta5'
}

task copyDependencies(type: Copy) {
   from configurations.compile
   into 'dependencies'
}

Is it worthwhile to do a contribution? AS You can see it's really easy to do, so I don't think so.

EDIT

From gradle 4+ it will be:

task copyDependencies(type: Copy) {
  from configurations.default
  into 'dependencies'
}

Answer 2

the dependency configuration of compile is deprecated in gradle 4.x. You need to replace that with default. So the above code-snippet becomes:

dependencies {
  implementation 'com.google.inject:guice:4.0-beta5'
}
task copyDependencies(type: Copy) {
  from configurations.default
  into 'dependencies'
}

Answer 3

This is the equivalent Kotlin DSL version (added the buildDir prefix to make it copy the dependencies in the build folder):

task("copyDependencies", Copy::class) {
    from(configurations.default).into("$buildDir/dependencies")
}