Using War plugin but without creating an archive - gradle

Question

I'm trying to get Gradle to handle the deployment of a very large Web application. In the past when we used Ant, instead of creating a very large .war file, we would simply assemble all the code in one folder--libraries, .jsp's etc--and then scp them to the deployment destination. This would speed deployment since we would be moving only the files that changed.
I'm having trouble trying to do this with Gradle, however. Using the War plugin creates an actual .war file, which we don't want. I've tried simply creating a task that depends on 'classes' and that generates the necessary classes and resources folders. However, where are the library dependencies? How can I get this all in one place so I can do an scp?
Current build:
apply plugin: "java"
apply plugin: "maven"
apply plugin: 'war'
apply plugin: 'eclipse-wtp'
sourceCompatibility = 1.6
targetCompatibility = 1.6
repositories {
maven {
url 'http://buildserver/artifactory/repo'
}
}
sourceSets {
main {
java {
srcDir 'src'
}
resources {
srcDir 'src'
}
}
}
webAppDirName = 'web'
dependencies {
compile 'antlr:antlr:2.7.6'
compile 'antlr:antlr:2.7.7'
*** etc ***
}
task deploystage(dependsOn: 'classes') << {
println 'assemble and scp code here'
}

Answer 1

your right Opal ... no easynway to use the War plugin for this ... although it would be nice if it had a createExplodedWar option. I just used the Jar plugin methods.
The .jars were available, along with other things in war.classpath.files:
gradle.taskGraph.whenReady { TaskExecutionGraph taskGraph ->
project.ext.set("allclasspathjars", files(war.classpath.files))
}
I then when through these to separate out the .jars from the other stuff:
task deployJars(dependsOn: 'classes') << {
FileUtils.cleanDirectory(new File("web/WEB-INF/lib/"))
project.allclasspathjars.each {File file ->
if(file.name.endsWith(".jar")) {
println "Including .jar: " + file.name
org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.copyFile(file, new File("web/WEB-INF/lib/" + file.name))
}
}
After this I could copy all the classes & resources into the .war structure:
task createExplodedWar(type: Copy, dependsOn: 'deployJars') {
from 'build/classes/main'
from 'build/resources/main'
into 'web/WEB-INF/classes'
}
Finally used Gradle SSH Plugin to push it up to tomcat and restart the server.
All good.