In the old forum, this was already discussed inhttps://discuss.gradle.org/t/classpath-in-application-plugin-is-building-always-relative-to-app-home-lib-directory/2012. In my opinion, this is a nasty bug. The solutions from Luke and another guy in this topic do not work for me and with Gradle 4.1.
We want some property files to live in a separate “configuration” directory, and the generated classpath entry should point to it. Insted, the generated script still insists that this directory is within lib, so it adds this entry: “%APP_HOME%\lib\configuration”.
Note, I tried this classpath = files("%APP_HOME%\\configuration"), but it is ignored. The contents of this ‘configuration’ directory on the other side are correctly copied into the zip.
Sorry guys, but this is really annoying, spending hours of work trying to find a solution on simple things.