Make gradle compileJava dependsOn spotlessApply

Question

I have a Gradle project with several submodules. In my project there is a spotless task configured. Now I want to make a compileJava task dependent on spotlessApply task. I try it in this way:

subprojects {
    apply plugin: 'java'
    apply plugin: 'com.diffplug.gradle.spotless'

    spotless {
        java {
            target 'src/**/*.java'
            licenseHeaderFile  "$rootDir/buildSrc/CopyrightHeader.java"
            importOrder(['java', 'javax', 'org', 'com'])
            eclipseFormatFile "$rootDir/buildSrc/formatter.xml"
        }
        format 'misc', {
            target 'src/**/*.md', 'src/**/*.xml', 'src/**/*.xsd', 'src/**/*.xsl'
            indentWithSpaces()
            trimTrailingWhitespace()
            endWithNewline()
        }
    }

    compileJava.dependsOn spotlessApply
}

But it produces an error:

Could not get unknown property 'spotlessApply' for project (...) of type org.gradle.api.Project.

I also tried something like this:

compileJava.dependsOn project.tasks.findByName('spotlessApply')

But it doesn't work.

Answer 1

The Spotless plugin creates its tasks in an project.afterEvaluate block to allow you to configure the extension before it creates the task(s) - see here

To solve this, simply depend on the task's name (i.e. as a string) instead and Gradle will resolve the task when its needed.

compileJava.dependsOn 'spotlessApply'