How do you use artifacts to segment build artifacts into custom configurations for distribution - gradle

Question

I have a simple multi-module project and I'd like to create a distribution from it. I roughly would like the distro to look like
foo/
bar/
baz/
For each module, I'd like to declare that their artifacts (and dependencies) go into one of foo, bar, or baz directories in the distro.
The obvious thing doesn't seem to work, and the Gradle docs are vague about how exactly artifacts + configurations work, so I'm not sure what I've done wrong.
I have in the root build.gradle
configurations {
foo
bar
baz
}
Then in moduleA I put for its artifacts:
artifacts {
foo jar
}
And so on, for each module, its artifacts are set to the desired configuration.
These configurations are listed if I print them out ala configurations.each {c -> println(c.name) }, so they're created correctly, but if I try to iterate over the files or allArtifacts of my custom configurations, they're empty.
I'd previously done something like this by creating ancillary modules whose dependencies would be listed like:
dependencies {
foo "com.mypackage.group:module:1.0"
}
And then another module for bar, and another for baz and so on. This seemed to work but it was a hassle to maintain. Using custom configurations along with artifacts seemed like a more maintainable solution for this.

Answer 1

I think you are interested in the getArtifacts()
Here's an example
// generated with gradle init --type java-library
apply plugin: 'java'
repositories {
jcenter()
}
dependencies {
compile 'org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.7.21'
testCompile 'junit:junit:4.12'
}
configurations {
foo {
extendsFrom compile
}
}
artifacts {
foo jar
}
task showMe << {
println "Files:"
configurations.foo.files.each { println " $it" }
println "Artifacts: "
configurations.foo.artifacts.each { println " $it" }
}
Output:
:showMe
Files:
/home/alpar/.gradle/caches/modules-2/files-2.1/org.slf4j/slf4j-api/1.7.21/139535a69a4239db087de9bab0bee568bf8e0b70/slf4j-api-1.7.21.jar
Artifacts:
ArchivePublishArtifact_Decorated alpar:jar:jar:
You could potentially simplify it even more by referring to the projects tasks directly ( considering that foo bar etc are projects )
task distribution(type: Zip) {
from project(':foo').jar { into "foo" }
}
or
task distribution(type: Zip) {
('foo', 'bar').each { p ->
from project(":$p").jar { into p }
}
}
for short.
It seems like the publish PublishArtifact was not ment to be used with a Zip task, as it's non trivial to connect.
You could also loop trough all sub projects that have some custom parameter defined for the name of the task to pick up to make it more self contained in the sub-projects.
Make sure to also include some dependencies to make your task work even if called after a complete clean, or on a fresh checkout.