Orchestrating Gradle build invocations with custom tasks - groovy

Question

I’m trying to define two new Gradle tasks, buildAll and pubLocal, to run other tasks in a specific order.
When gradle buildAll is invoked, I want Gradle to do the same thing as if I had executed gradle clean build writePom (see below for writePom).
When gradle pubLocal is executed, I want Gradle to do the same thing as if gradle buildAll install had been executed.
Here’s my best attempt thus far:
// build.gradle
task writePom << {
pom {
project {
groupId 'mygroup'
artifactId 'mylib'
version version
inceptionYear '2015'
licenses {
license {
name 'Blah'
url 'blah'
distribution 'blah'
}
}
}
}.writeTo("build/libs/pom.xml")
}
task buildAll(dependsOn: clean, build, writePom)
task pubLocal(dependsOn: buildAll, install)
When I run gradle buildAll on this, I get:
myuser#mymachine:~/tmp/myapp$./gradlew buildAll
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* Where:
Build file '/Users/myuser/tmp/myapp/build.gradle' line: 67
* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating root project 'myapp'.
> Could not find method buildAll() for arguments [{dependsOn=task ':clean'}, task ':build', task ':writePom'] on root project 'myapp'.
Any ideas as to where I’m going awry?

Answer 1

This may be a left-over from copy-pasting, but your strings are not quoted consistently using standard single- or double-quotes. Example:
}.writeTo(“build/libs/pom.xml")
does not quote the string properly, as it opens with the “ character instead of ". Same with the single-quotes above it.
You can see from the way your code is highlighted, that everything in red is interpreted as a string. If this is the case in your actual code, the buildAll and pubLocal tasks will not be recognized, as they are part of a string rather than code.
UPDATE:
Since the above answer is irrelevant now, here is another possibility. The error message shows that only the "clean" task is listed in the dependsOn parameter. The buildAll task dependencies should be declared like this:
task buildAll(dependsOn: [clean, build, writePom])
Similar with the pubLocal task.

Answer 2

I'm using Gradle 2.4. The following file includes the Maven plugin, uses a list [] in the dependsOn, and ensures that clean must be executed before build:
apply plugin: 'maven'
task writePom << {
pom {
project {
groupId 'mygroup'
artifactId 'mylib'
version version
inceptionYear '2015'
licenses {
license {
name 'Blah'
url 'blah'
distribution 'blah'
}
}
}
}.writeTo("build/libs/pom.xml")
println "TRACER writePom"
}
task clean << { println "TRACER clean" }
task build << { println "TRACER build" }
build.mustRunAfter clean
task install << { println "TRACER install" }
task buildAll(dependsOn: [clean, build, writePom])
task pubLocal(dependsOn: [buildAll, install])
I get this output (minus Gradle 3 warnings):
bash-3.2$ gradle buildAll
:clean
TRACER clean
:build
TRACER build
:writePom
TRACER writePom
:buildAll
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
and this:
bash-3.2$ gradle pubLocal
:clean
TRACER clean
:build
TRACER build
:writePom
TRACER writePom
:buildAll
:install
TRACER install
:pubLocal
BUILD SUCCESSFUL