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4.7.8 Plugin JAR Dependencies - Reference Documentation

Authors: Graeme Rocher, Peter Ledbrook, Marc Palmer, Jeff Brown, Luke Daley, Burt Beckwith, Lari Hotari

Version: 2.3.8

4.7.8 Plugin JAR Dependencies

Specifying Plugin JAR dependencies

The way in which you specify dependencies for a plugin is identical to how you specify dependencies in an application. When a plugin is installed into an application the application automatically inherits the dependencies of the plugin.

To define a dependency that is resolved for use with the plugin but not exported to the application then you can set the export property of the dependency:

compile('org.spockframework:spock-core:0.5-groovy-1.8') {
    export = false
}

In this case the Spock dependency will be available only to the plugin and not resolved as an application dependency. Alternatively, if you're using the Map syntax:

compile group: 'org.spockframework', name: 'spock-core',
     version: '0.5-groovy-1.8', export: false

You can use exported = false instead of export = false, but we recommend the latter because it's consistent with the Map argument.

Overriding Plugin JAR Dependencies in Your Application

If a plugin is using a JAR which conflicts with another plugin, or an application dependency then you can override how a plugin resolves its dependencies inside an application using exclusions. For example:

plugins {
    compile(":hibernate:$grailsVersion") {
        excludes "javassist"
    }
}

dependencies { runtime "javassist:javassist:3.4.GA" }

In this case the application explicitly declares a dependency on the "hibernate" plugin and specifies an exclusion using the excludes method, effectively excluding the javassist library as a dependency.