Hide Exec output for non-failing tasks

Old Forum
1

One of the (many) things I love about Gradle is that its output is terse if everything is working, but verbose if something goes wrong. However, this breaks down when I have to run an Exec task as part of my build. In my case, one of my subprojects is calling make, which is always verbose. Is there a way I can get Gradle to swallow all of make’s output unless make fails?

2

It’s possible with some scripting. You can set the output stream of the ‘Exec’ task to a stream that stores the output in memory, configure the ‘Exec’ task not to fail in case of a non-zero exit code, and add a task action that checks the exit value and if necessary, prints the previously captured output and fails the task. For details, see ‘Exec’ in the Gradle Build Language Reference.

3

Thanks for the pointers. This is what I’m using now, inside my Exec task:

// Only show the output if something went wrong.
     standardOutput = new ByteArrayOutputStream()
     errorOutput = standardOutput
     ignoreExitValue = true
     doLast {
         if (execResult.exitValue != 0) {
             println(standardOutput.toString())
             throw new GradleException("exec failed; see output above")
         }
     }