Suggestion to make a shadowed jar the default output of a project

[bric3]

Describe your use-case which is not covered by existing documentation.

In a multi-project, a project foo — that is consumed by other projects — needs to shadow one or more its packages. And there's no need for the "regular" non shadowed "output".

One can write in a consuming project :

dependencies {
  implementation(project(path = ":foo", configuration = "shadow"))
}

However, this is not ideal as it allows to mistakenly declare implementation(project(":foo")) thus providing unshadowed packages / dependencies.

I suggest documenting the following example to address this usage.

As a reminder in Gradle, on a java library, folk are used to api, implementation, runtimeOnly (and compileOnly configurations). These configurations are where dependencies are declared (they are declarable). But when consuming a project like project(":foo"), Gradle looks for consumable configurations, and there are apiElements (for compilation) and runtimeElements (for runtime) for java library project.

So I suggest to document the tuning of these consumable configurations, to only have one declaration of the project without thinking about exposed configurations.

Consuming projects :

dependencies {
  implementation(project(":foo"))
}

configurations {
  named("apiElements") {
    outgoing.artifacts.clear()
    outgoing.artifact(tasks.shadowJar))
    exclude(group = "org.eclipse.jetty")
  }
  named("runtimeElements") {
    outgoing.artifacts.clear()
    outgoing.artifact(tasks.shadowJar)
    exclude(group = "org.eclipse.jetty")
  }
}

Reference any relevant documentation, other materials or issues/pull requests that can be used for inspiration.

https://gradleup.com/shadow/multi-project/

Are you interested in contributing to the documentation?

I can do this part of the documentation.

[Goooler]

Documented in #1941. Would you mind taking a review?

[bric3]

Thanks for the update @Goooler. Also, good catch on the variant !