Why is this gradle flatDir example failing?

Question

I'm completely new to gradle. I've put the following build.gradle together as a means of seeing how dependencies get pulled from a flatDir repository. The 'localrepo' directory contains two files 'a.txt', and 'b.txt' and nothing else. When I run 'gradle dependencies' I get failures:

:dependencies

------------------------------------------------------------
Root project
------------------------------------------------------------

copytest
+--- :a.txt: FAILED
\--- :b.txt: FAILED

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 5.506 secs

Why?

Here's my build.gradle:

configurations {
  copytest
}

repositories {
  flatDir name: 'localRepository', dirs: 'localrepo'
}

dependencies {
  copytest ':a.txt'
  copytest ':b.txt'
}

task copyTask(type: Copy) {
  from configurations.copytest
  into 'result'
}

Answer 1

A flatDir repo uses a simple heuristic to turn the dependency's module name into the filename to be searched for. If you specify :a.txt, Gradle will search for a.txt.jar, or, if you have project.version set, also for a.txt-theVersion.jar. To add arbitrary files to a configuration, instead of declaring a flatDir repo, you can use copytest files("some/path").