How to declare project artifacts in non-Java build? - gradle

Question

I have multi-project Gradle build that contains also non-Java projects.
I want to declare the artifacts create by one such project in a way that I can use project/configuration dependencies to get them, e.g.
consumer:
dependencies {
myConf project(path: ':producer', configuration: 'myConf')
}
What I currently have is this:
producer:
configurations {
myConf
}
task produceFile {
//... somehow create the file...
outputs.file file('path/to/file')
}
artifacts.add('myConf', produceFile.outputs.files.singleFile, { builtBy produceFile })
Is there a better way to declare the artifact than my clumsy version?
I couldn't figure out a way to pass the task dependency from the artifact to the producing task in one go.

Answer 1

According to the documentation article on Legacy publishing and the javadoc on the ArtifactHandler, for your simple example it should be sufficient to just pass the task, as long as the task type extends AbstractArchiveTask (e.g. Zip or Jar):
artifacts.add('myConf', produceFile)
... or in the more Gradle-ish way:
artifacts {
myConf produceFile
}
The article mentioned above has another example, where a File is passed directly to the add method, which requires you to specify the task to build the file in the way you did in your example.
However, let me propose other ideas for syntax that may be experienced more 'lightweight':
artifacts {
myConf files(produceFile).singleFile { buildBy produceFile }
// or
myConf file: files(produceFile).singleFile, buildBy: [produceFile]
}
These two examples use the Project.files(...) method to resolve the output(s) of the task instead of accessing them manually. The second example makes use of the map syntax often provided by Gradle.
If you want to somehow standardize your way to publish your custom artifacts, I would propose to create a custom task type that offers any of the different arguments the ArtifactHandler can process as a method or property:
class MyTaskType extends DefaultTask {
// ... other stuff ... of course this should be part of a plugin
def getArtifact() {
return ... // either a (Configurable)PublishArtifact (if constructor is available) or a map representation
}
}
task produceFile(type: MyTaskType) {
// configure somehow
}
artifacts {
myConf produceFile.artifact
}