Gradle plugin for multiplatform builds

Idea

This Gradle plugin serves as an alternative to "Application" plugin which is part of the Gradle distribution. That plugin has "run" task which allows running of the Java application, but the project I had couldn't use it easily (without hacks) since I had SWT application with different includes needed for each platform. Thus, this plugin was born.

There are two purposes in this plugin, similar to the one available in Application plugin:

• running
• creating output, final archives - per environment. Available supported outputs are
  • tgz - for linux-like target environments, initiated with tar command
  • NSIS-based installation - for windows-like target environments, created with installation statement

Archive output

The output archive format is as follows (you might need to adapt your scripts and file tree to accomodate this contraint):

(root) ... all core files, with overrides included (if existing) ...
  - lib
    - ... all JARs (dependencies) are here ...

NSIS helper defines

NSIS installations are helped with following parameters sent to the script:

• VERSION - value of the multiplatform.version property
• OUTPUT_FILENAME - value of the ${project.name}-${version}-${classifier}.exe expression
• INSTALL_SOURCE_DIR - absolute path to the temporary directory where all of archive files are placed

Override files

If you have files that need to be placed in the per-environment archive, you can place them in separate directories and then use overrideDir property of archive to artifact model object to say where those files are placed.

This feature, thus, allows you to have e.g. .EXE files for windows installations and .SH for Linux archives.

Shell scripts

In case you want to pack shell scripts, they are always placed in tgz archive with 755 permissions. If this is not a suitable behavior, you might need to fork this repo since it is not configurable for now.

DSL

The entire DSL is contained in multiplatform statement. I decided to present you with the complete working example since it is the easiest to getting how it works:

// import Ant helper static values to differ system families
import static org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.condition.Os.*

// import helper static constants to differ system architectures
import static net.milanaleksic.gradle.multiplatform.MultiPlatformAppPlugin.*

// this is where the plugin can be downloaded from
buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven {
            url 'http://maven.milanaleksic.net/release'
        }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'net.milanaleksic.gradle:multiplatform:0.3'
    }
}
apply plugin: 'multiplatform'

// finally, the DSL
multiplatform {
    version = mcsVersion             // mcsVersion: String - a simple version string (e.g. '0.3')

    runner {
        mainClassName = srcMainClass // srcMainClass: String - class with main()
        workingDir = startupDir      // startupDir: String - startup up directory for the JVM process
    }

    // artifacts domain object is used to define output archives
    artifacts {
        // for configuring NSIS ant task
        nsisSetupScript = nsisSetupScriptLoc            // nsisSetupScriptLoc: String - location of global NSIS script

        coreFiles = project.copySpec {                  // define files which need to be present in all artifacts
            into('bin')
            from("$startupDir/.launcher",
                    "$startupDir/configuration.xml")
        }

        // e.g. for windows, 32-bit environment, we want to create an archive with "win32" classifer suffix 
        installation('win32', FAMILY_WINDOWS, ARCH_X86) {
            nsisSetupScript = nsisSetupScriptLoc32 // in case you wish to override global NSIS script
            overrideDir = file(buildOverridesWin)  // buildOverridesWin: String - override files for this environment
        }
        installation('win64', FAMILY_WINDOWS, ARCH_X86_64) {
            overrideDir = file(buildOverridesWin)
        }

        tar('linux32', FAMILY_UNIX, ARCH_X86) {
            overrideDir = file(buildOverridesLinux)
        }
        tar('linux64', FAMILY_UNIX, ARCH_X86_64) {
            overrideDir = file(buildOverridesLinux)
        }
    }
}