Gradle: How do I publish a zip from a non-java project and consume it in a java project?

Question

I have a multi-project setup. I created a non-java project whose artifact is a zip file that I will unzip in another project. So the idea is as below

my-non-java-project
  build.gradle
  ------------
    apply plugin: 'base'

    task doZip(type:Zip) { ... }

    task build(dependsOn: doZip) << {
    }

    artifacts {
      archives doZip
    }


some-java-project
  build.gradle
  ------------
    apply plugin: 'war'
    configurations {
      includeContent // This is a custom configuration
    }
    dependency {
      includeContent project(':my-non-java-project')
    }

    task expandContent(type:Copy) {
      // Here is where I would like get hold of the all the files
      // belonging to the 'includeContent' configuration
      // But this is always turning out to be empty. Not sure how do I publish
      // non-java content to the local repository (as understood by groovy)
    }

So, my question is, how do I publish the artifacts of a non-java project to the internal repository of groovy such that I can pick it up at another java-based project?

Answer 1

Not exactly sure what you're after, but here's a quick-and-dirty way to get access to the FileCollection of the :my-non-java-project:doZip task outputs:

project(":my-non-java-project").tasks.getByName("doZip").outputs.files

Note that the archives configuration is added by the Java plugin, not the Base plugin. But you can still define a custom configuration in my-non-java-project and add the artifact to it with the code in your OP:

//in my-non-java-project/build.gradle
configurations {
    archives
}
artifacts {
    archives doZip
}

Then you can access the task outputs via the configuration, like so (again, quick-and-dirty):

//in some-java-project/build.gradle
project(":my-non-java-project").configurations.archives.artifacts.files

Note that you can expand the content of your zip file using zipTree.

If you need to actually publish the zip produced by my-non-java-project, you can read about that here.