How to figure out why a task is executed?

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#1

I am looking for a way to figure out why a task is being ran. I know I can use the --dry-run flag to see what tasks would be executed, but I am trying to figure out why a certain task is executing.

The reason I am looking for this is because I use a 3rd party swagger generation plugin and for some reason it executes any time the build task runs. However, I don’t see anything in its source code where it adds itself as a finalizedBy task to build or make build depend on itself. I want to run the swagger generation task on demand, not anytime build executes.

I see it adding itself as a dependsOn classes. But the reason it runs before build continues to allude me:

Is there any way to figure out why this task runs after the build task?

#2

I think because of a few lines down where it adds the tasks output under certain conditions to the artifacts of the archives configuration and thus is a dependency of assemble which is a dependency of build.

#3

You can add the task tree plugin to your build

plugins {
    id "com.dorongold.task-tree" version "1.5"
}

Then you can run gradle build taskTree

And get output similar to

:build
+--- :assemble
|    \--- :jar
|         \--- :classes
|              +--- :compileJava
|              \--- :processResources
\--- :check
     \--- :test
          +--- :classes
          |    +--- :compileJava
          |    \--- :processResources
          \--- :testClasses
               +--- :compileTestJava
               |    \--- :classes
               |         +--- :compileJava
               |         \--- :processResources
               \--- :processTestResources

If you want this available everywhere, you can put the config into a init script. Eg:

initscript {
    repositories {
        maven { url "https://plugins.gradle.org/m2" }
    }
    dependencies {
	classpath "gradle.plugin.com.dorongold.plugins:task-tree:1.5"
    }
}
rootProject {
    apply plugin: com.dorongold.gradle.tasktree.TaskTreePlugin
}
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#4

Just a few notes:

  • Currently the task-tree plugin does not work under Gradle 6.8 or newer. I hopefully will find time soon to fix this.
  • the plugin does not yet detect tasks added by finalizedBy.
1 Like
#5

For some reason I never got notifications that I got responses on this. I appreciate the responses.

The “archives” configuration depending on build sounds very plausible and I am going to take a look at that. (I already have a fix in place just by being smarter about when I apply the swagger plugin…but still very curious about why it runs anytime build does, if it is applied, so going to explore this a bit).

Also, thanks for the pointer to the task tree plugin, I use Gradle 6.8 so can’t use it but will definitely keep an eye on it for my future needs.

#6

but still very curious about why it runs anytime build does, if it is applied, so going to explore this a bit

I explained that, didn’t I?

#7

Yes, by “curious about why it runs build” and “going to explore this a bit” I just meant I was going to experiment with it a bit based on your explanation (i.e. make changes to the swagger plugin to not add the artifact to the archives configuration)

1 Like