Custom dependency management plugin in Gradle

Question

How do you write a custom gradle plugin to handle dependencies in a custom module descriptor, from a custom repository? The gradle documentation says the following, but I haven't been able to find anything that tells me how .

Even if your project is using a custom dependency management system or something like an Eclipse .classpath file as master data for dependency management, it is very easy to write a Gradle plugin to use this data in Gradle.

I've been maintaining a Custom Ivy resolver for ATG projects (forked from this project ), but Gradle recently deprecated this with version 1.8, and I need to port the implementation to a native Gradle plugin.

Implementations of ATG use 'modules' (not unlike Gradle projects), that have a MANIFEST.MF file for a module descriptor. These files define other 'modules' that a module depends on, and also a list of paths (jars or directories) that form the (direct) classpath for the current module.

eg

ATG-Class-Path: lib/classes.jar lib/commons-beanutils-1.7.jar
ATG-Required: MyProj.core MyProj.integration.webservices DAF.Endeca.Assembler

Module dependencies are transitive, and may refer to custom modules or modules that sit within the ATG product installation. Hence, I need to define a custom repository that can use the ATG product installation as a source of artifacts.

Without Gradle, I need to maintain dependencies in the form of

1. ATG's MANIFEST.MF files
2. Eclipse .classpath files
3. Dependencies for the Ant build-script
4. SonarQube configurations

Since I can't get rid of the ATG MANIFEST.MF files, I would like to write a write a custom plugin to allows them to be used in Gradle builds. I can then use Gradle as my build system, which can also generate Eclipse .classpath and .project files, and run Sonar against the project.

Gradle seems to have a lot of source code, and rummaging through it for the last couple of days hasn't got me anywhere.

If someone can point me to a list of interfaces that need to be implemented to (1) implement a custom repository, and (2) implement a custom dependency resolver (to use custom files as module descriptors), that should be enough to get me started.

Answer 1

The Eclipse .classpath use case mentioned above can be solved by parsing that file and translating it to Gradle file dependencies. It isn't currently possible to plug in a custom repository implementation.