Gradle Essentials

Bundling an application distributable

In the first example, we ran our application by using the java command directly from the command line. Usually, such command-line applications are shipped with scripts to run the application so that the end user need not always write the whole command by hand. Also, while developing, we repeatedly need to run the app. It would be nicer if we could write a task in our build file such that an app can be run in one Gradle invocation.

The good news is that there already exists such a plugin called application, shipped with Gradle, which can do both for us. For this example, we will copy over the hello-test project as hello-app. Let's make simple modifications to our build.gradle as follows:

apply plugin: 'java' ...