What is Grails Build Config Transitive = false

Question

I've noticed that in our build config there's a transitive = false in the plugins what is the meaning of this? what's the difference when doing an excludes i.e

excludes 'code-coverage', 'maven-publisher', 'codenarc'

Answer 1

You can find an explanation in earlier documentation:

Disabling transitive dependency resolution

By default, Grails will not only get the JARs and plugins that you declare, but it will also get their transitive dependencies. This is usually what you want, but there are occasions where you want a dependency without all its baggage. In such cases, you can disable transitive dependency resolution on a case-by-case basis:

runtime('com.mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.16',
        'net.sf.ehcache:ehcache:1.6.1') {
    transitive = false
}

// Or
runtime group:'com.mysql',
        name:'mysql-connector-java',
        version:'5.1.16',
        transitive:false

Excluding specific transitive dependencies

A far more common scenario is where you want the transitive dependencies, but some of them cause issues with your own dependencies or are unnecessary. For example, many Apache projects have 'commons-logging' as a transitive dependency, but it shouldn't be included in a Grails project (we use SLF4J). That's where the excludes option comes in:

runtime('com.mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.16',
        'net.sf.ehcache:ehcache:1.6.1') {
    excludes "xml-apis", "commons-logging"
}

// Or
runtime(group:'com.mysql', name:'mysql-connector-java', version:'5.1.16') {
    excludes([ group: 'xml-apis', name: 'xml-apis'],
             [ group: 'org.apache.httpcomponents' ],
             [ name: 'commons-logging' ])

As you can see, you can either exclude dependencies by their artifact ID (also known as a module name) or any combination of group and artifact IDs (if you use the Map notation). You may also come across exclude as well, but that can only accept a single string or Map:

runtime('com.mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.16',
        'net.sf.ehcache:ehcache:1.6.1') {
    exclude "xml-apis"
}