How can I define two different 'distribution' tasks in gradle?

Question

The normal behavior of the distTar and distZip tasks from the application plugin in gradle seems to be to copy the contents of src/dist into the zip and tar files, but I have a subfolder in src/dist that I want to exclude from the default distribution, and include it for a new (extended) task, possibly to be called distZipWithJRE.

I have been able to exclude this folder in the default task as follows:

distributions.main {
    contents {
        from('build/config/main') {
            into('config')
        }

        from('../src/dist') {
            exclude('jre')
        }
    }
}

How can I define a second task that behaves just like the original (unmodified) task?

Answer 1

Using Gradle 4.8 I had to tweak the answer to use 'with' from CopySpec instead

distributions {
    zipWithJRE {
        baseName = 'zipWithJRE'
        contents {
            with distributions.main.contents
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

It seems that what you're looking for is in the docs. You need to leave current settings as is and for zipWithJRE create and configure custom distribution:

distributions {
    zipWithJRE {
        baseName = 'zipWithJRE'
        contents {
           from { distributions.main.contents }
        }
    }
}