Chapter 18. The War Plugin

The war plugin extends the Java Plugin. It disables the default jar archive generation of the Java Plugin and adds a default war archive task.

18.1. Tasks

TBD

18.2. Project layout

Table 18.1. War plugin - project layout

Directory	Meaning
`src/main/webapp`	Web application sources

18.3. Dependency management

The War plugin adds two dependency configurations: providedCompile and providedRuntime. Those configurations have the same scope as the respective compile and runtime configurations, except that they are not added to the WAR archive. It is important to note that those provided configurations work transitively. Let's say you add commons-httpclient:commons-httpclient:3.0 to any of the provided configurations. This dependency has a dependency on commons-codec. This means neither httpclient nor commons-codec is added to your WAR, even if commons-codec were an explicit dependency of your compile configuration. If you don't want this transitive behavior, simply declare your provided dependencies like commons-httpclient:commons-httpclient:3.0@jar.

18.4. Convention properties

Table 18.2. War plugin - directory properties

Directory Name Property	Directory File Property	Default Name	Default File
webAppDirName	webAppDir	`main/webapp`	`srcRoot/main/webapp`

18.5. War

The default behavior of the War task is to copy the content of src/main/webapp to the root of the archive. Your webapp folder may of course contain a WEB-INF sub-directory, which again may contain a web.xml file. Your compiled classes are compiled to WEB-INF/classes. All the dependencies of the runtime ^[19] configuration are copied to WEB-INF/lib.

Have also a look at War .

18.6. Customizing

Here is an example with the most important customization options:

Example 18.1. Customization of war plugin

build.gradle

import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.GetMethod

group = 'gradle'
version = '1.0'
usePlugin('war')
usePlugin('jetty')

configurations {
   moreLibs
}

repositories {
   flatDir(dirs: "$rootDir/lib")
   mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    compile ":compile:1.0"
    providedCompile ":providedCompile:1.0@jar", "javax.servlet:servlet-api:2.5"
    runtime ":runtime:1.0"
    providedRuntime ":providedRuntime:1.0@jar"
    testCompile "junit:junit:3.8.2"
    moreLibs ":otherLib:1.0"
}

war {
    fileSet(dir: file('src/rootContent')) // adds a file-set to the root of the archive
    webInf(dir: file('src/additionalWebInf')) // adds a file-set to the WEB-INF dir.
    additionalLibs(dir: file('additionalLibs')) // adds a file-set to the WEB-INF/lib dir.
    libConfigurations('moreLibs') // adds a configuration to the WEB-INF/lib dir.
    webXml = file('src/someWeb.xml') // copies a file to WEB-INF/web.xml
}

jar.enabled = true

[jettyRun, jettyRunWar]*.daemon = true
stopKey = 'foo'
stopPort = 9451
httpPort = 8163

task runTest(dependsOn: jettyRun) << {
    callServlet()
}

task runWarTest(dependsOn: jettyRunWar) << {
    callServlet()
}

private void callServlet() {
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient()
    GetMethod method = new GetMethod("http://localhost:$httpPort/customised/hello")
    client.executeMethod(method)
    new File(buildDir, "servlet-out.txt").write(method.getResponseBodyAsString())
    jettyStop.execute()
}

Of course one can configure the different file-sets with a closure to define excludes and includes.

If you want to enable the generation of the default jar archive additional to the war archive just type:

Example 18.2. Generation of JAR archive in addition to WAR archive

build.gradle

jar.enabled = true

18.7. Eclipse WTP

EclipseWtp has a default instance with the name eclipseWtp. It generates a .settings/org.eclipse.wst.common.component file.

^[19]The runtime configuration extends the compile configuration.