Task dependency resolution only executes dependend task once

Help/Discuss
1

Hi all,

I have a project setup with a:

  • java project
  • application plugin used
  • docker plugin
  • custom tasks around integration tests

where

  • a task like runDockerApplication depends on stopDockerApplication
  • a task like testWithinDocker depends on runDockerApplication too
  • the task testWithinDocker is finalizedBy testTearDown
    ** the task testTearDown has a dependsOn stopDockerApplication
  • the task stopDockerApplication has an explicit outputs.upToDateWhen { false }

The problem:
running ./gradlew testWithinDocker only executes stopDockerApplication once at the beginning as it is the earliest, well resolved task dependency in the graph but doesn’t re-execute it by finaliziation.

Is there a way to solve this or did I missed or misunderstood s.th.?!

Thank you and with kind regards,
~Marcel

(P.S. last tested with gradle 3.5)

P.S: even some experiments with ```
testTearDown.doLast {
stopDockerApplication.execute()
}

doesn't help, seems to the manual task `.execute()` even runs though the dependency mechanism and is not executed at all
2

Tasks are not designed to be executed multiple times. Each task should represent an independent piece of work. If you need to stop a Docker application multiple times in a build, you should use the custom task types provided by the plugin and declare separate tasks like preBuildStopApplication and postTestStopApplication to represent what you’re doing. You should never call execute().

3

yeah … I expected that answer :wink:

It’s really cumbersome to define this bunch of tasks and it blows up the gradle definition massively… but that, how it is …

by the way: I “solved” it by using gradle builds in gradle builds running the same tasks and therefore don’t need to redefine any Task properties multiple times but just call a wrapper task that starts this task in another build.

Thanks anyway for the answer.
~Marcel