Gradle NoClassDefFoundError in jar dependency - gradle

Question

I have developed a custom Gradle plugin and assembled as jar. This plugin has one dependency:
plugin/build.gradle
dependencies {
compile 'com.jcraft:jsch:0.1.53'
}
I have included my plugin in another consumer project (as jar in libs):
consumer/build.gradle
apply plugin: 'gg-release-plugin'
buildscript {
repositories {
flatDir {
dirs 'libs'
}
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.myplugin.plugin:myplugin:1.0'
}
}
Everything works fine, but when code that uses classes of the dependency com.jcraft:jsch:0.1.53 is executed, I get an error:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/jcraft/jsch/JSch
What am I doing wrong? How can I include the dependencies in jar file?

Answer 1

Seems, you've created a plugin jar library with compile time depnedency, that is not included anywhere in your final jar.
You can try to create your plugin jar as a fat jar, using Gradle FatJar plugin or something else. In that case, you'll have a single jar with all the dependent classes inside. But this could lead to problems, if someone will use the same library.
Or you can try to provide a JSch library together with your plugin jar and make a consumer build script dependency like:
buildscript {
repositories {
flatDir {
dirs 'libs'
}
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.myplugin.plugin:myplugin:1.0'
classpath 'com.jcraft:jsch:0.1.53'
}
}
As I know, if you use a Maven repo to publish your plugin, you can provide a pom.xml to describe all the plugin's dependencies, but as I see, you are using a flatDir for it, so, it seems not to be possible.