Best practice to build 2 different ear within the same project

Old Forum
1

Hi,

I’m using gradle 1.4, under debian linux environment.

I have a multiproject build, that includes many wars. I need to build more than one ear, according to customers needs. Here is a simplified example, to focus the problem: For an ear-project I need to build two ears: the first ear (let’s say ear1) must include a ejb module and a war (let’s say war1), and the second (say ear2) is the same of the first, but also need a war2. The two ears have different dependencies and, since I’m deploying to jboss appserver, I have to build a list of shared jars that I will put in the appserver lib dir, avoiding to place them in the ear.

So the situation is:

ear1
 -jar
 -war1

ear2
 -jar
 -war1
 -war2

and I have also two zip including the dependencies for the 2 ear’s: shared_libs1.zip shared_libs2.zip

The dependencies/ ear tasks are something like this:

dependencies {
    deploy project(':jar')
    deploy project(path: ':war1', configuration: 'archives')
...omissis..
ear {
 deploymentDescriptor {
  displayName = project.name
  version = 5
   webModule("war1-${project.version}.war",'/war1')
 }
}

dependencies {
    deploy project(':jar')
    deploy project(path: ':war1', configuration: 'archives')
    deploy project(path: ':war2', configuration: 'archives')
...omissis..
ear2 {
 deploymentDescriptor {
  displayName = project.name
  version = 5
   webModule("war1-${project.version}.war",'/war1')
  webModule("war2-${project.version}.war",'/war2')
 }
}

The logic to extract the shared libs is a little bit complex, and also I need to place a deployment description in the two ear’s.

In my undestanding, I cannot place two ear definition in the same build.gradle; I can create a task ear2(type: ear) but then I cannot use the deploymentDescriptor.

I could solve this issue by creating 2 project, one for ear1 and the other for ear2, but this will cause a multiplication of the folders and I don’t like it.

I thought that I could solve this creating a copy of the build.gradle (say build2.gradle), but, while the build using build.gradle works fine, using build2.gradle I receive some errors:

gradle -b build2.gradle ear
* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating root project 'xxx-ear'.
> Project with path ':jar' could not be found in root project 'xxx-ear'.

I thought that the problem is the settings.gradle, but I have another error:

gradle -c ../settings.gradle -b build2.gradle ear
* What went wrong:
Could not select the default project for this build. No projects in this build have build file 'build2.gradle'.

So, question are: 1) what is the proper solution to a “double ear” need? 2) if the “double build.gradle” approach is the best (or better than nothing :slight_smile: ), how can I solve the errors that I’m facing?

Thanks,

Luca

2

Ad 1. There isn’t a single correct approach. The ‘ear’ plugin makes it easy to produce a single Ear. If you need to produce more than one Ear, you can either use two different projects, or declare another Ear task and perform a bit more manual configuration to set it up as needed. For details, see ‘Ear’ in the Gradle Build Language Reference.

Ad 2. ‘-b’ only works for single-project builds, but apparently you have a multi-project build. In that case, only ‘settings.gradle’ decides which build scripts are used, and conditionally using either ‘build.gradle’ or ‘build2.gradle’ is not a recommended approach.