Gradle Creating Executable JAR File

In this toturial we will show you how to configure Gradle build script to build the JAR file that can be executed by java command. In this article we just build the simple application without dependencies.

For example you have created a standard Gradle project as below structure.

With the main class GradleCreatingExecutableJarExample as below.

package simplesolution.dev;

public class GradleCreatingExecutableJarExample {

    public static void main(String... args) {
        System.out.println("Hello SimpleSolution.dev");
    }
}

To configure Gradle to build runnable JAR we need to add below configuration to build.gradle

jar {
    manifest {
        attributes 'Main-Class': 'simplesolution.dev.GradleCreatingExecutableJarExample'
    }
}

The config above to set the application’s entry point to use main class simplesolution.dev.GradleCreatingExecutableJarExample

The complete build.gradle look like below:

group 'simplesolution.dev'
version '1.0.0'

apply plugin: 'java'

sourceCompatibility = 1.8

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

jar {
    manifest {
        attributes 'Main-Class': 'simplesolution.dev.GradleCreatingExecutableJarExample'
    }
}

Execute command below build the .jar file

gradle jar

or

gradlew jar

The .jar file will be generated under directory build/libs

You can open command line, navigate to build/libs directory and use command below to execute the .jar file

java -jar GradleCreatingExecutableJar-1.0.0.jar

The output look like this

Hello SimpleSolution.dev

That’s all we need to know to configure Gradle build script to build executable JAR file.

Download Source Code

The source code in this article can be found at: https://github.com/simplesolutiondev/GradleCreatingExecutableJar

Happy Coding 😊