How to manually download file from Maven repository in Gradle - gradle

Question

We have a huge monolith application which is build by multiple tools (shell scripts, Ant and Maven). The build process is quite complex:
a lot of manually steps
hidden dependencies between Ant targets
different steps must be executed depending on the used Operating System
We decided to simplify it by creating Gradle scripts which wraps all this logic (it is quite impossible to fix it, so we create a wrapper which standardize the way of executing all the logic). We have to download some files from the Maven repository, but we cannot use the dependencies syntax:
we don't need to always download all files
the versions of the downloaded artifacts are dynamic (depends on configuration located in completely different place)
we need a path to the downloaded files (e.g. we have to unpack an artifact distributed as zip)
How we can achieve it?

Answer 1

The easiest way to achieve it is to create a dynamic configuration with dependencies, and next resolve it. The resolve method returns paths to the dependencies on the local disk. It is important to use a unique name for every configuration. If not, executing the logic twice would fail (cannot overwrite the configuration with XYZ name).
Here is an example method which returns a path to an artifact. If the artifact is already available in the Gradle cache it won't be downloaded for the second time, but of course the path will be returned. In this example all artifacts are downloaded from Maven Central.
Method:
ext.resolveArtifact = { CharSequence identifier ->
def configurationName = "resolveArtifact-${UUID.randomUUID()}"
return rootProject.with {
configurations.create(configurationName)
dependencies.add(configurationName, identifier)
return configurations.getByName(configurationName, {
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}
}).resolve()[0]
}
}
Usage:
def jaCoCoZip = resolveArtifact('org.jacoco:jacoco:0.8.6')
def jaCoCoAgent = resolveArtifact('org.jacoco:org.jacoco.agent:0.8.6')