gradle - how to exclude WEB-INF/classes from war

Question

I have a fairly simple requirement. I have the following project layout:

project/build.gradle
 --src/main/java
 --src/main/res

What I would like to do is create a jar for all the java files in project/src/main/java

Include this jar file in the war and then exclude the WEB-INF/classes from the war file

My build.gradle look as follows:

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'eclipse'
apply plugin: 'jetty'
apply plugin: 'war'

dependencies {
..
    compile 'com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-core:2.3.0'
    compile 'com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-databind:2.3.0'
..
}

jar {
    archiveName = 'hello.jar'
}

war {
    dependsOn jar
    archiveName = 'hello.war'
    classpath fileTree(dir:'build/libs/',include:'*.jar')
    classpath configurations.compile
    webInf {
        from ('src/main/res') {
            include '**/*.*'
            into 'resources/'
        }
    }
}

---

I have tried various things to exclude WEB-INF/classes including the following snippets:

Using rootSpec.exclude:

war {
    dependsOn jar
    archiveName = 'hello.war'
    classpath fileTree(dir:'build/libs/',include:'*.jar')
    classpath configurations.compile
    rootSpec.exclude ('WEB-INF/classes')
    ...
}

Using classpath:

war {
    dependsOn jar
    archiveName = 'hello.war'
    classpath fileTree(dir:'build/libs/',include:'*.jar')
    classpath configurations.compile
    classpath fileTree(dir:'build/classes/', exclude:'*.class')
    ...
}

Using from ('war'):

war {
    dependsOn jar
    archiveName = 'hello.war'
    classpath fileTree(dir:'build/libs/',include:'*.jar')
    classpath configurations.compile
    from ('war') {
       exclude('WEB-INF/classes')
    }
}

Doing a direct 'exclude':

war {
    dependsOn jar
    archiveName = 'hello.war'
    classpath fileTree(dir:'build/libs/',include:'*.jar')
    classpath configurations.compile
    exclude('WEB-INF/classes')
    ...
}

Which were all the suggestions I found online - but none of them seems to work. Any ideas what I am doing wrong.

Here are links to some of the articles and code I found: Gradle: War Task has Conflicting Includes/Excludes

How to Exclude directory and its contents in gradle war

https://github.com/veny/smevente/blob/master/build.gradle

https://discuss.gradle.org/t/how-can-i-exlude-files-from-war-when-using-war-plugin-against-default-or-webappdirname-location/7366/6

The gradle version is 2.12.

Answer 1

Below is what worked for me, but you will still see an (harmless) empty package in the war bundle:

war {
    rootSpec.exclude('**/com/xxxxx/web/client/')
}