What is the preferred gradle approach to locally install an artifact? (equivalent to maven's "install")

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In maven (1) there is the concept of “install” which places the artifact in MAVEN_HOME_LOCAL.

This location is always used to pickup dependencies by other maven projects. Does gradle have an equivalent concept of a local home???

The gradle cache appears to be something similar, but I am not sure.

I want to start getting the development team using gradle, but I don’t know what my approach should be for local installs.

A related issue is here: http://issues.gradle.org/browse/GRADLE-1615

Is there any additional recommendations you might have?

Thanks in advance.

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The “publishToMavenLocal” task, provided by the “maven-publish” plugin - http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/publishing_maven.html

This goes to the exact same place that “mvn install” would put it.

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First question is if you need such a place. For example, if you have a single multi-project build rather than many small builds, you won’t need such a place, and won’t have versioning issues between the components of your application. This is a convenient model. Another solution is to have your CI server constantly building snapshots which are then used in dependent builds. Again, this model is more reliable than exchanging artifacts via a local repository.

If you do need a local repository, only use Maven local if it’s necessary to exchange artifacts with Maven builds. Otherwise it’s better to declare a Maven or Ivy repository with a ‘file://’ URL.

PS: The Gradle cache is a cache in the real sense of the word. It’s only reason of existence is performance optimization. It isn’t possible to install anything there, which is important to achieve reproducible builds.

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Patrick: Thank you.

I am trying to avoid maven altogether, though I may need to rethink that and its good to know there is an option with publishToMavenLocal.

Peter: Yes, most of what you say matches my understanding.

We do produce our flagship financial product with about 20 maven1 builds, each producing a locally build artifact (and uniquely tagged),

The maven 1 multiproject is used and so the reactor determines ordering - and all artifacts will be pushed to a remote repo.

So…what I’m hearing is that I should not base my strategy on what maven 1 formerly provided but think about what I need and how I can use gradle to provide it.

It’s a good concept