Sometimes I write custom tasks that generate things that would belong inside ‘build’. However, if I need to run these tasks early in the build cycle (say, before ‘compileJava’), I will need to add some sort of custom mkdir task to ensure that the directory exists.
This seems sort of icky to me. Is there a way for a task to depend on the existence of ‘${project.buildDir}’ without my making an explicit task for it?
If you declare the directory as an output of the task, it will be created automatically if it doesn’t exist. See 15.8.1. Declaring a task’s inputs and outputs in the Gradle User Guide. If you write a task class, you can also use the ‘org.gradle.api.tasks.OutputDirectory’ annotation.
Hm. I don’t see this happening. The example in 15.8.1 explicitly calls ‘destDirs.mkdirs()’
The following ‘build.gradle’ doesn’t work, for example (with Gradle 1.3).
task hello(type: Exec) {
outputs.dir "build"
commandLine "touch", "build/hello"
}
This only works when using the annotation based approach to specifying outputs, not when using the programmatic approach. I’ve opened GRADLE-2638 for this.