Gradle equivalent of Maven Assembly - maven

Question

As long as Gradle has been around, I'd have thought this was well documented, but I'm struggling. Sorry if this is obvious to everyone else.
I have a multi-project build setup with maven, I'm setting up gradle for comparison.
Project A produces a jar file, Project B produces a war file (and depends on the jar from A). Project C I want to create an assembly, i.e. a zip file. The zip file should contain the contents of a directory within project C, the war file from Project B, and the unpacked contents of a tomcat assembly pulled down from Archiva.
The problem I'm having is that when gradle evaluates the build.gradle files, it fails because it can't find the war file - which is no surprise, the war file hasn't been built yet.
So, how do I express the dependency on the war file in such a way that it doesn't cause the failure during evaluation?
apply plugin: 'distribution'
description = """E2am Assembly"""
project(':assembly') {
dependencies {
compile project(':webapps/e2am')
}
}
dependencies {
compile group: 'com.e2open.platform', name: 'e2am', version:'9.0-SNAPSHOT', ext:'war'
compile group: 'com.e2open.platform.third-party.tomcat', name: 'tomcat-assembly',version:'7.0.42-1002', classifier:'bin', ext:'zip'
}
task explodeTomcat(type: Copy, dependsOn: ':webapps/e2am:install'){
configurations.compile.filter { it.toString().endsWith(".zip") }.each{
from zipTree(it)
}
into 'TomcatUnpacked'
configurations.compile.filter { it.toString().endsWith(".war") }.each{
from it
}
into 'war'
}
distributions {
main {
baseName = 'e2am-assembly'
contents {
from { 'tomcat' }
from { 'TomcatUnpacked' }
from { 'war' }
}
}
}
distZip.dependsOn explodeTomcat
install.dependsOn distZip
Also, the top level project applies the 'java' and 'maven' plugin to all sub projects.
The error is:
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* Where:
Build file '/kwork/wkcopy/e2amA/assembly/build.gradle' line: 25
* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating project ':assembly'.
> Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':assembly:compile'.
> Could not find com.e2open.platform:e2am:9.0-SNAPSHOT.
Required by:
com.e2open.platform:assembly:9.0-SNAPSHOT
Can someone point me to documentation or a discussion that gets me farther down the road? Thanks!

Answer 1

You should take a look at Multi-project Builds - Project lib dependencies in the Gradle documentation.
Something like this should work:
dependencies{
compile project(:webapps/e2am)
compile group: 'com.e2open.platform.third-party.tomcat', name: 'tomcat-assembly',version:'7.0.42-1002', classifier:'bin', ext:'zip'
}
There's also an example that looks a lot like what you are trying to do - might be worth a look :)