Gradle: Create a non-executable jar and executable shell script with dependent libraries as a package distribution

Question

I am not a big fan of creating fat executable jars for java programs as it involves a massive overhead when I have multiple executable programs from the same project.

I want to be able to create a single library-like jar and create corresponding .sh scripts which pretty much have the structure of:

java -cp classpath_libs main_class program_args...

or any other executable where I can customize it to my needs but in a similar fashion(ex: hadoop jar project_jar main_class classpath_libs program_args ). Is this achievable in gradle? if so, how? Note, I need to create multiple scripts using different main classes from a single project.

Key requirement here is to be able to use final fully resolved classpath string.

UPDATE: I have seen examples of using the application plugin but it creates an executable jar with dependent libraries packaged into it. This is NOT what I am looking for.

Answer 1

So far as I have found, it appears there's no plugin that handles this directly. So, I used the java-library plugin, used the configurations.runtime classpath value and created the necessary scripts and the copy task to copy the libraries necessary into the necessary directories. For anyone interested, you may also try the distZip option in application plugin where gradle does create scripts for execution and package the necessary libraries in a distribution. You can take a look at the output of the script to see how the classpath is structured and create something similar.