Assembling a jar to include dependencies with Gradle

How to build a jar containing dependency jars with Gradle

As part of a hack day project at work I have started developing a plugin for use with ThoughtWorks Go CD.

After some initial confusion around how Go Server expects to find the plugin bundled, I realised that a jar file containing a lib folder of jars is the way to make it work.

The example plugins GitHub repository only showed the use of Maven as a project build tool, but I have gotten accustomed to using Gradle - so I need to do a bit of reverse engineering and searching online to find a way to produce a suitable jar to include the managed dependencies of my project.

Without further ado, here is the relevant snippet of Gradle configuration:

jar {
    into('lib') {
        from configurations.runtime
    }
}

This simply creates a lib directory within the generated jar.  The lib directory will contain the various jars that are pulled in by the managed dependencies.  By default this will include transitive dependencies.

This works with Gradle 2.2.1 and I would expect it to work for earlier versions.