64.8 Understanding how the Gradle plugin works

When spring-boot is applied to your Gradle project a default task named bootRepackage is created automatically. The bootRepackage task depends on Gradle assemble task, and when executed, it tries to find all jar artifacts whose qualifier is empty (i.e. tests and sources jars are automatically skipped).

Due to the fact that bootRepackage finds 'all' created jar artifacts, the order of Gradle task execution is important. Most projects only create a single jar file, so usually this is not an issue; however, if you are planning to create a more complex project setup, with custom Jar and BootRepackage tasks, there are few tweaks to consider.

If you are 'just' creating custom jar files from your project you can simply disable default jar and bootRepackage tasks:

jar.enabled = false
bootRepackage.enabled = false

Another option is to instruct the default bootRepackage task to only work with a default jar task.

bootRepackage.withJarTask = jar

If you have a default project setup where the main jar file is created and repackaged, 'and' you still want to create additional custom jars, you can combine your custom repackage tasks together and use dependsOn so that the bootJars task will run after the default bootRepackage task is executed:

task bootJars
bootJars.dependsOn = [clientBoot1,clientBoot2,clientBoot3]
build.dependsOn(bootJars)

All the above tweaks are usually used to avoid situations where an already created boot jar is repackaged again. Repackaging an existing boot jar will not break anything, but you may find that it includes unnecessary dependencies.