Chapter 52. Writing Custom Plugins

There are several places where you can put the source for the plugin.

In our examples, we will start with the plugin in the build script, to keep things simple. Then we will look at creating a standalone project.

To create a custom plugin, you need to write an implementation of Plugin. Gradle instantiates the plugin and calls the plugin instance's Plugin.apply() method when the plugin is used with a project. The project object is passed as a parameter, which the plugin can use to configure the project however it needs to. The following sample contains a greeting plugin, which adds a hello task to the project.

apply plugin: GreetingPlugin

class GreetingPlugin implements Plugin<Project> {
    void apply(Project project) {
        project.task('hello') << {
            println "Hello from the GreetingPlugin"
        }
    }
}

> gradle -q hello
Hello from the GreetingPlugin

One thing to note is that a new instance of a given plugin is created for each project it is applied to.

Most plugins need to obtain some configuration from the build script. One method for doing this is to use extension objects. The Gradle Project has an associated ExtensionContainer object that helps keep track of all the settings and properties being passed to plugins. You can capture user input by telling the extension container about your plugin. To capture input, simply add a Java Bean compliant class into the extension container's list of extensions. Groovy is a good language choice for a plugin because plain old Groovy objects contain all the getter and setter methods that a Java Bean requires.

Let's add a simple extension object to the project. Here we add a greeting extension object to the project, which allows you to configure the greeting.

apply plugin: GreetingPlugin

greeting.message = 'Hi from Gradle'

class GreetingPlugin implements Plugin<Project> {
    void apply(Project project) {
        // Add the 'greeting' extension object
        project.extensions.create("greeting", GreetingPluginExtension)
        // Add a task that uses the configuration
        project.task('hello') << {
            println project.greeting.message
        }
    }
}

class GreetingPluginExtension {
    def String message = 'Hello from GreetingPlugin'
}

> gradle -q hello
Hi from Gradle

In this example, GreetingPluginExtension is a plain old Groovy object with a field called message. The extension object is added to the plugin list with the name greeting. This object then becomes available as a project property with the same name as the extension object.

Oftentimes, you have several related properties you need to specify on a single plugin. Gradle adds a configuration closure block for each extension object, so you can group settings together. The following example shows you how this works.

apply plugin: GreetingPlugin

greeting {
    message = 'Hi'
    greeter = 'Gradle'
}

class GreetingPlugin implements Plugin<Project> {
    void apply(Project project) {
        project.extensions.create("greeting", GreetingPluginExtension)
        project.task('hello') << {
            println "${project.greeting.message} from ${project.greeting.greeter}"
        }
    }
}

class GreetingPluginExtension {
    String message
    String greeter
}

> gradle -q hello
Hi from Gradle

In this example, several settings can be grouped together within the greeting closure. The name of the closure block in the build script (greeting) needs to match the extension object name. Then, when the closure is executed, the fields on the extension object will be mapped to the variables within the closure based on the standard Groovy closure delegate feature.

When developing custom tasks and plugins, it's a good idea to be very flexible when accepting input configuration for file locations. To do this, you can leverage the Project.file() method to resolve values to files as late as possible.

class GreetingToFileTask extends DefaultTask {

    def destination

    File getDestination() {
        project.file(destination)
    }

    @TaskAction
    def greet() {
        def file = getDestination()
        file.parentFile.mkdirs()
        file.write "Hello!"
    }
}

task greet(type: GreetingToFileTask) {
    destination = { project.greetingFile }
}

task sayGreeting(dependsOn: greet) << {
    println file(greetingFile).text
}

greetingFile = "$buildDir/hello.txt"

> gradle -q sayGreeting
Hello!

In this example, we configure the greet task destination property as a closure, which is evaluated with the Project.file() method to turn the return value of the closure into a file object at the last minute. You will notice that in the above example we specify the greetingFile property value after we have configured to use it for the task. This kind of lazy evaluation is a key benefit of accepting any value when setting a file property, then resolving that value when reading the property.

Now we will move our plugin to a standalone project, so we can publish it and share it with others. This project is simply a Groovy project that produces a JAR containing the plugin classes. Here is a simple build script for the project. It applies the Groovy plugin, and adds the Gradle API as a compile-time dependency.

apply plugin: 'groovy'

dependencies {
    compile gradleApi()
    groovy localGroovy()
}

So how does Gradle find the Plugin implementation? The answer is you need to provide a properties file in the jar's META-INF/gradle-plugins directory that matches the name of your plugin.

implementation-class=org.gradle.GreetingPlugin

Notice that the properties filename matches the plugin's name and is placed in the resources folder, and that the implementation-class property identifies the Plugin implementation class.

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven {
            url uri('../repo')
        }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath group: 'org.gradle', name: 'customPlugin', version: '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
    }
}
apply plugin: 'greeting'

class GreetingPluginTest {
    @Test
    public void greeterPluginAddsGreetingTaskToProject() {
        Project project = ProjectBuilder.builder().build()
        project.apply plugin: 'greeting'

        assertTrue(project.tasks.hello instanceof GreetingTask)
    }
}

Gradle provides some utility classes for maintaining collections of object, which work well with the Gradle build language.

apply plugin: DocumentationPlugin

books {
    quickStart {
        sourceFile = file('src/docs/quick-start')
    }
    userGuide {

    }
    developerGuide {

    }
}

task books << {
    books.each { book ->
        println "$book.name -> $book.sourceFile"
    }
}

class DocumentationPlugin implements Plugin<Project> {
    void apply(Project project) {
        def books = project.container(Book)
        books.all {
            sourceFile = project.file("src/docs/$name")
        }
        project.extensions.books = books
    }
}

class Book {
    final String name
    File sourceFile

    Book(String name) {
        this.name = name
    }
}

> gradle -q books
developerGuide -> /home/user/gradle/samples/userguide/organizeBuildLogic/customPluginWithDomainObjectContainer/src/docs/developerGuide
quickStart -> /home/user/gradle/samples/userguide/organizeBuildLogic/customPluginWithDomainObjectContainer/src/docs/quick-start
userGuide -> /home/user/gradle/samples/userguide/organizeBuildLogic/customPluginWithDomainObjectContainer/src/docs/userGuide

The Project.container() methods create instances of NamedDomainObjectContainer, that have many useful methods for managing and configuring the objects. In order to use a type with any of the project.container methods, it MUST expose a property named “name” as the unique, and constant, name for the object. The project.container(Class) variant of the container method creates new instances by attempting to invoke the constructor of the class that takes a single string argument, which is the desired name of the object. See the above link for project.container method variants that allow custom instantiation strategies.