Customize the root folder of an archive created by the Distribution plugin

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1

I’m trying to use the Distribution plugin (Gradle 1.12) and (of course), I need to customize some of its operations but I can’t seem to make my customization work.

The first thing I need is to customize the root folder in the archive. Say I want to call it “rootFolder” for example instead of the default generated name (let’s call it defaultRootFolder to make this description more simple).

I looked in the source code at how the distribution tasks are created, and it appears that in my build script, I can access them and change their configuration.

The first thing I tried was:

tasks.windowsDistTar.into(‘rootFolder’)

When I do that, I correctly have the root folder of my archive called ‘rootFolder’, which is great, but inside, there is an extra folder called ‘defaultRootFolder’. I wondered how this could happen and looked at the source code, from the Zip task class all the way up to the AbstractCopyTask class. I discovered that an copy task (like Zip) has two copy specs, a root one (rootspec), and a child one (mainspec). In the distribution plugin, calling the into method on the zip task that takes a path and a closure uses the path for the main spec, not the root spec (at least, that’s my understanding). So I tried this:

tasks.windowsDistTar.into(‘rootFolder’)

tasks.windowsDistZip.mainSpec.into(‘blop’)

I ended up with an archive that has the root folder called ‘rootFolder’, that contains a folder called ‘blop’. I thought it all made sense and maybe I didn’t have to change the ‘into’ of rootSpec and could just change the one on mainSpec (I want one root folder only, not a root folder and a subroot folder).

So I just did

tasks.windowsDistZip.mainSpec.into(‘rootFolder’) Unfortunately, this caused the root folder to be called ‘rootFolder’ (great) BUT it did contain a subfolder called ‘defaultRootFolder’, which I don’t want.

How can I get just one root folder in my archive, and specify its name?

Thanks in advance.

2

‘applicationName = “rootFolder”’ should have the desired effect. Alternatively, you could modify archive entry paths using ‘windowsDistZip.eachFile { … }’, define your own Zip task, or use the more recent ‘distribution’ or ‘java-library-distribution’ plugins, which appear to be more configurable than the ‘application’ plugin.

3

Thanks Peter. Note that I am using the Distribution plugin (not the Application plugin), hoping that it will remain in Gradle 2.0 since I’m investing in using it. applicationName doesn’t seem to make a difference in my archive structure.

4

Check the user guide chapter for the ‘java-library-distribution’ plugin. I think the same works for the ‘distribution’ plugin.

5

Thanks. It looks like the java-library-distribution user guide chapter is even more terse :wink: I am still looking into it, trying to understand how I can override the value for “into” that is being passed at task (dynamic) creation and also trying to understand why there can be both a root folder and a “subroot” folder in the archive. There must be a solution to this. I’m trying to stay away from messing with rootSpec and mainSpec as they look like internals and I’d really like to stick to public API if possible.

6

I think you can just change the distribution’s ‘baseName’ as shown in that chapter. The two ‘Zip’ task related solutions I mentioned should also work.

7

It looks like I can’t customize the Distribution plugin enough for my needs. I won’t be able to have enough control of the “into” part. It’s hard-coded to use the archive name, which can be customized (but then it affects the actual archive name, and I need the root folder name and the archive name to be different). The archive name, if not customized, will use the baseName, but that means I can’t customize the archive name anymore. So in the end, I will have to give up the Distribution plugin (I have too many constraints) and use my own Zip task. It should not be very difficult, especially since there is a lot of documentation.

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