10 The Groovy Plugin

Gradle is written in Groovy and offers you to write your build scripts in Groovy. But this is an internal aspect of Gradle which is strictly separated from building Groovy projects. You are free to choose the Groovy version your project should be build with. This Groovy version is not just used for compiling your code and running your tests. The groovyc compiler and the the groovydoc tool are also taken from the Groovy version you provide. As usual, with freedom comes responsibility ;). You are not just free to choose a Groovy version, you have to provide one. Gradle expects that the groovy libraries are assigned to the groovy dependency configuration. Here are some examples how this works (the notation depends on your resolvers):

  dependencies {
      addMavenRepo()
      groovy "org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:1.6-beta-1"
      // further declarations
  }

  dependencies {
      addFlatDirResolver('lib', new File(rootDir, 'lib'))
      clientModule(['groovy'], ":groovy-all:1.5.5") {
           dependency(":commons-cli:1.0")
           clientModule(":ant:1.7.0") {
               dependencies(":ant-junit:1.7.0:jar", ":ant-launcher:1.7.0")
           }
      }
  }


Folder	Meaning

src/main/groovy	Application/Library sources in Groovy

src/test/groovy	Test sources in Groovy

Table 10.1:

Default Directory Layout (additional to the Java layout)


Dir Name	Dir File	Default Value Name	Default Value File

groovySrcDirNames	groovySrcDirs	main/groovy	[srcRoot/main/groovy]

groovyTestSrcDirNames	groovyTestSrcDirs	test/groovy	[srcRoot/test/groovy]

Table 10.2:

Groovy Convention Object (extends JavaConvention).


Property	Type	Default Value

floatingGroovySrcDirs	List	empty

floatingGroovyResourceDirs	List	empty

floatingGroovyTestResourceDirs	List	empty

floatingGroovyTestResourceDirs	List	empty

Table 10.3:

Groovy Convention Object (extends JavaConvention) - Floating Dir Properties

All the Groovy source directories can contain Groovy and Java code. The Java source directories may only contain Java source code (and can of course be empty)²

10.1 Compile

The GroovyCompile task has two instances, compile and testCompile. The task type extends the Compile task (see section 10.1)


Additional Convention to Property Mapping

Task Instance	Task Property	Convention Property

compile	groovySourceDirs	groovySrcDirs

testCompile	groovySourceDirs	groovyTestSrcDirs

Have a look at org.gradle.api.tasks.compile.GroovyCompile to learn about the details. The compile task delegates to the Ant Groovyc task to do the compile. Via the compile task you can set most of the properties of Ants Groovyc task.

Chapter 10The Groovy Plugin

10.1 Compile

Chapter 10
The Groovy Plugin