Gradle: is it possible to publish to Gradle's own local cache? - gradle

Question

I know that I can use the maven plugin coupled with mavenLocal() to install an artifact and use it locally.
However investigating this a bit further, I notice that this means the artifacts are installed to Mavens's standard ~/.m2, but at the same time Gradle's own cache lives under ~/.gradle/caches in a different format.
This seems wasteful to me, a) working with two local caches, and b) having to add mavenLocal() to all projects. I was wondering if there is a way to publish an artifact to Gradle's ~/.gradle/caches ?

Answer 1

Note that the local Maven repository is not (really) a cache, and that the Gradle cache is not a repository. Gradle uses its cache only to cache remote artifacts, it should not copy artifacts retrieved from local Maven repositories there. In turn, you cannot publish artifacts to the Gradle cache.
So the approach to publish to and use mavenLocal() should not be as wasteful as you think. Also, you do not have to add mavenLocal() to all projects of a multi-project separately. You can simply use something like allprojects { repositories { mavenLocal() } } in your root project. Or if you want mavenLocal() in all your independent Gradle projects you could even try adding it to ~/.gradle/init.gradle.

Answer 2

Here is an example with code.
As it's not possible to publish into Gradle. The workaround is to publish into the maven and use it in Gradle.
Step 1 publish the code to local maven repository /users/jay/.m2/repository/
Step2 - Use the local maven repo code in another project.
Step #1 (Publish to local maven repo)
apply plugin: 'maven-publish'
publishing {
publications {
mavenJava(MavenPublication) {
from components.java
}
}
}
Step #2 (Use the local maven repo in your gradle project)
repositories {
// ..... Other repositories
mavenLocal()
}
dependencies {
compile 'com.jai:myapp:1.0.0'
}