How can I exclude classes from a Grails 3 plugin

Question

I'm trying to convert a Grails 2 plugin to Grails 3 and I have trouble excluding a couple of domain classes that are used in tests only from the resulting jar.

The documentation states:

in your build.gradle you should exclude the compiled classes from the JAR file:

jar {
    exclude "com/demo/**/**"
}

...but if I try this I get the following error from Gradle: Could not find method jar() for arguments [build_64zizslf5a7zfo329yz5tdsoi$_run_closure1@566c53c] on root project '...'

I can post the entire stack trace but it doesn't look very helpful. I'm using Gradle 2.3, provided by the default Gradle wrapper that the create-plugin command generates. I also haven't made any other changes to build.gradle because my plugin doesn't require any external dependencies.

Answer 1

See the project at https://github.com/jeffbrown/excludesdemo. That includes 2 domain classes under https://github.com/jeffbrown/excludesdemo/tree/master/grails-app/domain.

The top level build.gradle file at https://github.com/jeffbrown/excludesdemo/blob/72896a3f88f617d530bbdde8976d5bfe8d1e820a/build.gradle#L73 contains the following:

jar {
    exclude 'package1/**'
}

When you run ./gradlew jar you should see that the jar file generated at build/libs/excludesdemo-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar does contain package2/Author.class and does not contain package1/Person.class.