Gradle exclude specific files inside dependency

Question

I was wondering if there was anyway to exclude specific files,that are inside a dependency (not a transitive dependency), from being downloaded.

I am switching a build from Ant + Ivy to Gradle and this was done with in Ivy before. I ask because I have a single dependency that contains many compiled wsdl jars in Artifactory that we are pulling down, but I do not want to download all of the jars in the dependency.

In Ivy it was setup like:

These 6 artifacts are published to Artifactory in to one directory repo/dep.location/example/7.3/jar.

<publications>
    <artifact name="foo-1-0" type="jar" />
    <artifact name="foo-1-0-async" type="jar" />
    <artifact name="foo-1-0-xml" type="jar" />
    <artifact name="bar-1-0" type="jar" />
    <artifact name="bar-1-0-async" type="jar" />
    <artifact name="bar-1-0-xml" type="jar" />
</publications>

This is how I retrieve only two of the six artifacts.

<dependency org="dep.location" name="example" rev="7.3"
            conf="compile,runtime">
    <include name="foo-1-0-async"/>
    <include name="foo-1-0-xml"/>
</dependency>

Currently if I attempt to do something similar in Gradle the excludes are ignored and all six artifacts are downloaded.

compile (group:"dep.location", name:"example", version:"7.3")
{
    exclude module:'foo-1-0-xml'
    exclude module:'bar-1-0'
    exclude module:'bar-1-0-async'
    exclude module:'bar-1-0-xml'
}

I am using Gradle version 1.8.

The things that you are trying to exclude are artifacts, not modules. The only supported way to include/exclude artifacts in Gradle that I'm aware of is by type, which won't help here. — Peter Niederwieser, May 13 '14 at 19:45
This is not supported in gradle. But an alternative is change how you publish to artifactory. Why don't you start publishing individual jar files in artifactory? — vkg, May 13 '14 at 19:55
Thats a possibility, but there are a some where around 40-50 services total that are being pre-compiled into the client, async, and xml jars and each with it's own Jenkins jobs and all that good stuff. That is a lot of publishing and extra work. — bhumphrey, May 13 '14 at 20:02
http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/dependency_management.html Maybe this will help. — explodingcreeperssss, May 13 '14 at 20:05

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered May 21 '15 at 06:03

I don't think Gradle has any built in support for accomplishing this, but you can clean the artifacts out from the classpath yourself.

Inspired by this thread on the Gradle forums I came up with this:

// The artifacts we don't want, dependency as key and artifacts as values
def unwantedArtifacts = [
    "dep.location:example": [ "foo-1-0-xml", "bar-1-0", "bar-1-0-async", "bar-1-0-xml"],
]

// Collect the files that should be excluded from the classpath
def excludedFiles = configurations.compile.resolvedConfiguration.resolvedArtifacts.findAll {
    def moduleId = it.moduleVersion.id
    def moduleString = "${moduleId.group}:${moduleId.name}:${moduleId.version}" // Construct the dependecy string
    // Get the artifacts (if any) we should remove from this dependency and check if this artifact is in there
    it.name in (unwantedArtifacts.find { key, value -> moduleString.startsWith key }?.value)
}*.file

// Remove the files from the classpath
sourceSets {
    main {
        compileClasspath -= files(excludedFiles)
    }
    test {
        compileClasspath -= files(excludedFiles)
    }
}

Note that Gradle will probably still download the files and cache them for you, but they should not be in your classpath.

I'm not sure that you can use the resolution strategy to change which artefacts are resolved. — Raniz, May 24 '15 at 23:30
@smilyface Please share some details for the future readers. — Shubham AgaRwal, Jan 20 '23 at 13:08

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 21 '15 at 07:17

I am not sure if this is what you want, but since we are using Spring Boot and Wildfly, we have to remove the tomcat-starter module from the spring boot standard package, and it looks very similar to what you've done. However, our code states:

configurations {
    compile.exclude module: "spring-boot-starter-tomcat"
}

I have not checked if the corresponding jar is not downloaded or just not on the classpath, I know however that it is not used anymore.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 03 '21 at 19:56

This question suggested to me , when I'd looking for excluding unwanted jar from one of my dependency group. Yeah, there are ways to exclude specific files,that are inside a dependency.

implementation (group: 'net.sf.jasperreports', name: 'jasperreports', version: '6.1.0'){
//example : org.olap4j:olap4j:0.9.7.309-JS-3
exclude group: 'org.olap4j', module: 'olap4j'

}

Gradle exclude specific files inside dependency

3 Answers3