What kind of dependency is this?

[kolle (Andreas Koller)]

It worked putting the copy into a closure as stated here:

Right way to copy contents from dependency archives?

An idiomatic solution would look like this: configurations { api } dependencies { api 'somegroup:someArtifact:someVersion' } task extractApi(type: Sync) { dependsOn configurations.api from { // use of closure defers evaluation until execution time configurations.api.collect { zipTree(it) } } into "$buildDir/api/" }