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Problems during build when referencing static lib directory gradle

I use a build.gradle file which needs to reference some jar files which are neither available on a public nor an internal repository.

Because of that I put the jar files into a lib directory which is below my Eclipse project:

dependencies {
    ...
    compile files('lib/*.jar')
}

This works fine as long as I run or export my program from within Eclipse. But when I try gradle build gradle fails with this error:

Could not normalize path for file 'C:\Workspaces\MyProject\project\lib\*.jar'.

I changed the path to lib\*.jar, added a leading ./, removed the \*.jar but to no avail.

When I remove the compile files line from the dependencies and add this to repositories instead

repositories {
    ...
    flatDir { dirs './lib' }
}

the compiler complains about error: cannot find symbol, and all these symbols are in the jars referenced from the lib directory. When I run gradle --debug I can see from the log that the directory referenced by flatDir is being searched in:

10:02:20.587 [DEBUG] [org.gradle.api.internal.artifacts.repositories.resolver.ResourceVersionLister] using org.gradle.internal.resource.transport.file.FileResourceConnector@48499739 to list all in /C:/...../lib/ 
10:02:20.592 [DEBUG] [org.gradle.api.internal.artifacts.repositories.resolver.ResourceVersionLister] found 7 urls

7 is the count of files in the lib directory.

Why does this work in Eclipse (STS 3.7 with gradle tooling) and not from the command line ? I tried both gradle 2.2.1 and 2.5.

Solution

  • You need to use a FileTree instead of a FileCollection:

    compile fileTree(dir:'lib', include:'*.jar')

    The reason why eclipse behaved differently than your gradle is most likely because you didn't run gradle eclipse (a task added by the eclipse plugin). Eclipse does not interact with you build.gradle at all naturally. The eclipse task updates your eclipse to be in snyc with gradle.