Delete/Remove file from war with Gradle - gradle

Question

I'm using gradle to build a Spring Boot application, and I would like to have the application.properties file removed from the war, because that will be loaded externally (this is running in a tomcat container, not embedded).
I've looked around StackOverflow and the Gradle docs to try to figure out what to do, but I don't know which phase to tie into, and if I exclude the file before or after the war is created. There also seem to be multiple ways of dealing with files.
I believe Maven uses packagingExcludes for the equivalent.

Answer 1

Although I was not able to prevent a file from being added to the war, I was able to remove a file after the war was created - thanks in part to a tip from this question: Is there a quick way to delete a file from a Jar / war without having to extract the jar and recreate it?
In my build.gradle file I appended the war command with an exec command so that I could run a command after the war file had been created. The command will remove the application.properties file from the war. This is what the task extension looks like:
war << {
exec {
workingDir 'build/libs'
commandLine 'zip', '-d', "${appName}-${appVersion}.war", 'WEB-INF/classes/application.properties'
}
}
In short, it changes the working directory to the location that gradle places the war, and then uses the zip command to remove a file from the war.

Answer 2

You also have the option that if you don’t care for these properties files to be copied from the src/main/resources to the build/resources/main folder (not just excluded when build/resources/main is copied to the War), you could use:
In build.gradle file;
processResources {
exclude('application.properties')
}