Help with kicking off the war or ear task

I have this post out on stack overflow

As stated there, my issue is i want my users to be able to config their deployer with this in their gradle file

project(":app_server:") {
  apply plugin: "server_plugin"
  dependencies {
    libertyDeploy project(":app_war")
  }
}

In the stack overflow, i have my deploy task. Now, as stated there, i can get the name of the war (or ear when i get war working) fairly easy using gradles artifact resolution. My problem is once it gets to the deployTask(targetTask) lines in the plugin, it has the correct project:task combination, but it never fires the war or ear task. Therefore, it tries to deploy a file that doesn’t exist yet.

How do I set this to trigger the (in this examples) “:app_war:war” task?