Gradle: Cannot configure artifactory from an external build script - gradle

Question

I am new to gradle and would like to access my artifactory repository from it. If I put all configurations into one build script, the build succeeds. Here are the relevant parts of my build.gradle:
allprojects {
apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'eclipse'
apply plugin: 'artifactory'
}
// ...
buildscript {
repositories {
maven {
url 'http://repo.jfrog.org/artifactory/gradle-plugins'
}
maven {
url artifactory_contextUrl + 'plugins-release'
credentials {
username = artifactory_user
password = artifactory_password
}
}
}
dependencies {
classpath(group: 'org.jfrog.buildinfo', name: 'build-info-extractor-gradle', version: '2.0.16')
}
}
artifactory {
contextUrl = artifactory_contextUrl
publish {
repository {
repoKey = 'libs-release-local'
username = artifactory_user
password = artifactory_password
maven = true
}
}
resolve {
repository {
repoKey = 'libs-release'
username = artifactory_user
password = artifactory_password
maven = true
}
}
}
dependencies {
// My dependencies ...
}
// Rest of the build script ...
Now, I would like to pull out the artifactory part into a separate gradle script for better organization. This is where the build goes wrong. Quite surprisingly, I get the following error even if I copy my build.gradle to foo.gradle, and change build.gradle to just contain the single line
apply from: 'foo.gradle'
The error is
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* Where:
Script '/path/to/my/project/foo.gradle' line: 5
* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating script.
> Plugin with id 'artifactory' not found.
In case this is not a bug, can anyone please explain this behavior of gradle's apply from and propose a solution?
Thank you

Answer 1

The apply from part is parsed once the build script is already configured, so telling Gradle where to find the plugins with specific ID is too late. You'll have to keep the buildscript part in the script, or put it in the init script:
apply from : 'http://link.to/my/gradle.script'

Answer 2

You can also use the fully qualified class name to apply the plugins in your helper script:
buildscript {
repositories {
jcenter()
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
classpath "com.adaptc.gradle:nexus-workflow:0.5"
classpath "org.jfrog.buildinfo:build-info-extractor-gradle:2.2.4"
}
}
apply plugin: org.jfrog.gradle.plugin.artifactory.ArtifactoryPublicationsPlugin
apply plugin: com.adaptc.gradle.nexusworkflow.NexusWorkflowPlugin
Note that Gradle won't find the plugins if you put quotes around the class name, as you would do normally with plugin names.
This is how I found the class name for the Artifactory plugin:
I downloaded the plugin which was thankfully open source.
I searched for the name of the plugin among the files and found
artifactory-puplish.properties.
It contained the following
property: implementation-class=org.jfrog.gradle.plugin.artifactory.ArtifactoryPublicationsPlugin
The source of nexus-workflow has no such properties file so I looked around until I found
plugins-gradle-master/nexus-workflow/src/main/groovy/com/adaptc/gradle/nexusworkflow/NexusWorkflowPlugin.groovy