Gradle: remove some files from an existing war | for each war-file do: unpack, remove/filter, assemble war - gradle

Question

I'm relatively new to gradle, so this might be a typical newbee-question.
In our gradle build, we have a set of war files (dependencies) that all include a file that we need to remove from those war files, before building our ear file.
How can I achieve the following:
- for all war files in a folder,
- extract war content to a location (using a Copy task & zipTree)
- re-pack to a new war applying a filter (using War & excludes)
I assume I'll create a new task and add some 'dependsOn' declarations.
task excludeUnwantedFiles(){
file(directoryWithOriginalWars).eachFile { file ->
???? unpack war, filter, assemble new war file ????
}
}
ear.dependsOn(excludeUnwantedFiles)
excludeUnwantedFiles.dependsOn(downloadAllOriginalWarsIntoDirectory)
How do I create that task, that executes for each war-file? What is the best way to do this?
Is there a way I can to this in one task? E.g. with the Copy task and using zipTree(fooBarWithFile.war) as 'from' and 'war(fooBarWithoutFile.war)' and applying a filter in between?
Or is this the way to go, just with a loop? Delete/Remove file from war with Gradle
Any help is highly appreciated!
Cheers,
d.
---------UPDATE-------------------
Thanx Lance Java for your solution.
As I mentioned in my comment, I faced the problem that the war files were downloaded/extracted during execution time and hence not accessable to define the new tasks at configuration time.
My workaround for this is to use tarTree (with a filter) to access the list of war-files that are not yet extracted. See my code example below:
def warFileSourceTarGz = '...tar.gz'
def nfsLibDir="$buildDir/dependencies/"
def nfsLibDownloadDir="$buildDir/downloadedDependencies/"
// task that downloads & extracts the tar.gz
task fetchNfsDependencies(type: Copy) {
from tarTree(warFileSourceTarGz)
into nfsLibDownloadDir
}
// loop through all war files inside the tar.gz and
// create a task to remove unwanted libraries for each war
task excludeUnwantedJarsFromWars(dependsOn: fetchNfsDependencies){
// access the "remote" tar.gz file to get the list of war-files to loop over
def warFileSource = tarTree(warFileSourceTarGz).matching{
include '*.war'
}
// for every war-file, create an exclude-path
warFileSource.visit { nextWarFile ->
if(nextWarFile.name.endsWith('.war')) {
String taskName = "excludeUnwantedJarsFrom_${nextWarFile.name.replace('.war', '')}"
String nextWarFilePath = nfsLibDownloadDir+"/"+nextWarFile.name
Zip tweakWarTask = tasks.create(name: taskName, type: Zip, dependsOn: fetchNfsDependencies) {
from zipTree(nextWarFilePath)
destinationDir = file(nfsLibDir)
archiveName = nextWarFile.name
// exclude these jars, as they cause classloading problems in our ear deployment.
exclude 'WEB-INF/lib/jcan-optrace*'
}
// hook into build-process
ear.dependsOn(tweakWarTask)
}
}
}
ear.dependsOn(excludeUnwantedJarsFromWars)

Answer 1

I'd create a Zip task per war file and wire all the tasks into the DAG by having assemble depend on them all
FileTree warFiles = fileTree(dir: 'path/to/wars', includes: ['**/*.war'])
warFiles.files.each { File warFile ->
String taskName = "tweakWar${warFile.name.replace('.war', '')}"
Zip tweakWarTask = tasks.create(name: taskName, type: Zip) {
from zipTree(warFile) {
exclude 'path/to/some/file.xml'
}
destinationDir = "$buildDir/tweakedWars"
archiveName = warFile.name
}
// wire the task into the dag
assemble.dependsOn tweakWarTask
}