Recently I’ve had to deal with a lot of gradle projects, specifically the multi-module ones. It’s dead easy to setup, however, every time I do it, I have to refer to one of my old projects to see the layout. So, hopefully, while this document will certainly help future me, I hope it is of help to you too.
First things first, create a project directory. We will refer this directory as ‘project root directory’ in future. For all the awesome things that I do, we’ll call this one, drum roll please … awesomeproject.
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mkdir awesomeproject cd awesomeproject |
Once in that directory, lets create the build.gradle file at the project root with the following content:
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// build.gradle apply plugin: 'distribution' |
Alongside this, create a settings.gradle file but leave it blank for now.
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touch settings.gradle |
Now create your sub-module project directories. In this example, we’ll create two directories, awesomeproject-scripts which will hold our deployment scripts and awesomeproject-service which will contain our actual java code.
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mkdir awesomeproject-scripts awesomeproject-service |
Time to create gradle files for your sub-modules. We won’t go into the detail of what the gradle files will actually contain, however, for semi-completeness, we’ll just apply some plugins as a marker to indicate the type of sub-module projects.
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// awesomeproject-scripts/build.gradle apply plugin: 'distribution' |
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// awesomeproject-service/build.gradle apply plugin: 'java' |
As you can see from above, our awesomeproject-scripts/build.gradle file applies the distribution plugin to indicate that it will need to archive its contents while the awesomeproject-service/build.gradle applies the java plugin to indicate that it will be compiling its java source.
Amazing! Now we just need to tell our root project to include these two sub-modules. This is simple. You know we left that settings.gradle file in the project root blank? Well, lets change that.
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// settings.gradle include 'awesomeproject-scripts', 'awesomeproject-service' |
Here, we are telling the root gradle project to include the sub-modules. Gradle will then expect build.gradle files within these directories and will execute jobs. It’s pretty clever so if you’ve got a module that needs to execute one of the other sub-modules first, it will run it in the correct required order.
More detailed documentation on this is available on gradle’s website, however, this should get you up and running quickly.
