Chapter 33. The Application Plugin

The Gradle application plugin extends the language plugins with common application related tasks. It allows running and bundling applications for the jvm.

33.1. Usage

To use the application plugin, include in your build script:

Example 33.1. Using the application plugin

build.gradle

apply plugin:'application'

To define the main-class for the application you have to set the mainClassName property as shown below

Example 33.2. Configure the application main class

build.gradle

mainClassName = "org.gradle.sample.Main"

Then, you can run the application by running gradle run. Gradle will take care of building the application classes, along with their runtime dependencies, and starting the application with the correct classpath.

The plugin can also build a distribution for your application. The distribution will package up the runtime dependencies of the application along with some OS specific start scripts. You can run gradle install to create an image of the application in build/install/projectName. You can run gradle distZip to create a ZIP containing the distribution.

33.2. Tasks

The Application plugin adds the following tasks to the project.

Table 33.1. Application plugin - tasks

Task name	Depends on	Type	Description
`run`	`classes`	`JavaExec`	Starts the application.
`startScripts`	`jar`	`CreateStartScripts`	Creates OS specific scripts to run the project as a JVM application.
`install`	`jar`, `startScripts`	`Sync`	Installs the application into a specified directory.
`distZip`	`jar`, `startScripts`	`Zip`	Creates a full distribution ZIP archive including runtime libraries and OS specific scripts.

33.3. Convention properties

The application plugin adds some properties to the project, which you can use to configure its behaviour. See Project.