Gradle exec commandLine not working for me

Question

I am trying to run an executable with arguments from gradle:

task deploy(dependsOn: jar) {
    exec {
        commandLine "javafxpackager -deploy -native -outdir ${deployDirName} -outfile ${jarBaseName} -srcfiles ./${project.buildDir}/${project.libsDirName}/${jarBaseName}-${project.version}.jar -appclass ${mainClass} -name ${jarBaseName} -title '${project.description}'"
    }
}

Gradle complains that the process ended up with non-zero return code, but if I copy the command and run it within bash terminal, it works flawlessly.

So what am I doing wrong?

Regards,

Answer 1

There are two problems with this code: First, the exec call happens outside a task action (doLast { ... }). As a result, exec will get called for every single build invocation (even when typing gradle help), in the configuration phase of the build. Second, commandLine accepts a list of command line arguments, not a single string.

It's almost always better to use a task type than the corresponding method, so this becomes:

task deploy(type: Exec) {
    dependsOn jar
    commandLine "javafxpackager", "-deploy",  "-native", ...
}

To find out how to configure a particular task (type), check the Gradle Build Language Reference.