How to make Gradle repository point to local directory

Question

For some reason my offshore team is not able to Download the artifacts(Dependencies) from my clients Artifactory which is our Organizations dependency repository."Refresh Dependencies" triggers nothing and gives TIME OUT EXCEPTION. I see the that my "Gradle Dependencies" are downloaded to the location "D:/C813507/Gradle/gradle-1.11/bin/caches/modules-2/files-2.1/". Can i zip this folder and send over to them ? How do they implement something in gradle that points to their local directory. My build gradle has the following line. How to point the URL to local directory in Windows OS

repositories {
         maven {
            url 'http://artifactory.myorg.com:8081/artifactory/plugins-release'
        }

}

Answer 1

If you can't give access to your offshore team, you can copy all dependencies jar that needed to a single directory, and then use flatDir repository.

repositories {
   flatDir {
       dirs 'D:/path/to/local/directory'
   }
}


dependencies {
   compile name: 'name-of-jar'
}

Another way without using flatDir repository is:

dependencies {
    compile files('/path/to/dir/something_local.jar')
}

Answer 2

Instead of configuring flatDir repository, you can declare a local maven repository as following:

repositories {
   maven {
       url 'file://D:/path/to/local/directory'
   }
}

As @Peter Niederwieser mentioned, flatDir repository doesn't support transitive dependency resolution. maven local repository does.

Answer 3

Using flatDir like below is one option :

repositories {
   flatDir {
       dirs 'D:/path/to/local/directory'
   }
}

This works. But if there is mavenCentral() or other maven repositories that contain the same JAR, priority will be given to maven repository over flatDir.

Excerpt from Gradle Documentation : https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/repository_types.html

Gradle will dynamically generate a module descriptor (without any dependency information) based on the presence of artifacts. However, as Gradle prefers to use modules whose descriptor has been created from real meta-data rather than being generated, flat directory repositories cannot be used to override artifacts with real meta-data from other repositories. For example, if Gradle finds only jmxri-1.2.1.jar in a flat directory repository, but jmxri-1.2.1.pom in another repository that supports meta-data, it will use the second repository to provide the module.

So flatDir is not good. We should use local maven repository like mentioned in the second answer. But there are couple of issues with the second answer

1. Not portable
2. If the artifact is also present in the global repo's, it is unclear from where will it be picked from.

We can solve these issues by using a solution like below :

1. Create a folder called libs in the project directory
2. Copy your artifacts into this libs directory (if you are using git or any other scm's, make sure to distribute this libs fodler so that others can just gradle build without any issues)
3. Declare a maven repo to your libs directory and call mavenLocal() before listing any other repos. This step is very important to make sure that the jar is picked from your local directory rather than from the other global repositories

repositories {
   maven {
       url uri("${projectDir}/libs")
   }

   mavenLocal()
   <All your Repos here>
   mavenCentral()
}

This way you can be sure that even if the JAR is present in other repo's it will only be picked from your local directory and the solution is also portable.

Answer 4

Open a file in the directory with a browser, and then copy the path.

 maven { url = "file:///C:/lib/repo/"}