Spring Boot Gradle Tomcat 8

Question

The Spring Boot reference guide provides instructions for upgrading to Tomcat 8 by setting a custom property in Maven:

<properties>
  <tomcat.version>8.0.3</tomcat.version>
</properties>

What is the equivalent way to do the same in a Gradle build?

I have tried the following to no avail. It stays on version 7.0.52 at app startup.

buildscript {
  ...    
  ext['tomcat.version'] = '8.0.3'
  ...
}

Answer 1

Gradle has no equivalent of a "parent pom", so you have to call out the dependency explicitly. Because it's groovy you can probably do it programmatically, something like:

configurations.all {
  resolutionStrategy.eachDependency { DependencyResolveDetails details ->
    if (details.requested.group == 'org.apache.tomcat.embed') {
        details.useVersion '8.0.3'
    }
  }
}  

We could add some support for version properties to the Spring Boot Gradle plugin (feel free to open an issue in github) but it would probably have to be optional.