Hey everyone :wave: This felt like a proper chann...

# gradle

[Michael Grigoryan]

Hey everyone 👋

This felt like a proper channel to ask for help.

Is there is a way to build and run Kotlin directly from Gradle CLI without defining separate tasks for each script in a centralized directory such as src with the following build.gradle.kts fi

le?
plugins {
    kotlin("jvm") version "1.6.0"
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

tasks {
    sourceSets {
        main {
            java.srcDirs("src")
        }
    }
}

[tapchicoma]

check Gradle precompiled script plugins

[Michael Grigoryan]

Is it in the Gradle documentation?

[Casey Brooks]

You could create a single project with multiple fun main(), and then use the application plugin and create separate tasks pointing to each different main function. You'd get the benefit of centralized dependency management and IntelliJ code insights, but the ability to easily run several code files without needing to create multiple Gradle subprojects

[tapchicoma]

@Michael Grigoryan https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/custom_plugins.html#sec:precompiled_plugins

[Michael Grigoryan]

Interesting approach @Casey Brooks , i'll look into that, thanks for your answer!

[Michael Grigoryan]

Thank you @tapchicoma !

[Michael Grigoryan]

@Casey Brooks you mean that I WILL need to create gradle subprojects?

[Casey Brooks]

Nope, you can do it all in the default root project, with all code in src/main/kotlin. Something like this should get you started

plugins {
    kotlin("jvm")
    application
}

val runA by tasks.registering(JavaExec::class) {
    classpath = sourceSets.getByName("main").runtimeClasspath
    mainClass.set("a.MainKt") // runs the main function in /src/main/kotlin/a/main.kt
}

val runB by tasks.registering(JavaExec::class) {
    classpath = sourceSets.getByName("main").runtimeClasspath
    mainClass.set("b.MainKt") // runs the main function in /src/main/kotlin/b/main.kt
}

val runC by tasks.registering(JavaExec::class) {
    classpath = sourceSets.getByName("main").runtimeClasspath
    mainClass.set("c.MainKt") // runs the main function in /src/main/kotlin/c/main.kt
}

[Michael Grigoryan]

Ah, I don't actually want to register any tasks in my Gradle build file. I just want to directly build and run the file from the CLI 😅 But thanks for the example

[Casey Brooks]

You can do a similar thing by passing properties from the command-line into Gradle to configure the default run task. For example:

plugins {
    kotlin("jvm")
    application
}

val runTask by project.properties
application {
    mainClass.set(runTask)
}

and running ./gradlew run -PrunTask=a.MainKt. Or using a when statement within the application configuration block to map a shorter task name to the specific main class, but then you're basically doing the same thing as separate tasks but making it harder to use.

[Casey Brooks]

I would not recommend running your code directly within the Gradle files. It's going to be much slower for both development and execution, as Gradle will invalidate caches with every change. If you just want a simple CLI, you probably shouldn't use Gradle at all, but use the Kotlin Scripting functionality directly.

• The official Kotlin compiler binary will be the most up-to-date, though a bit more verbose and doesn't support dependency management (https://kotlinlang.org/docs/command-line.html#run-scripts)
• kscript is similar, but adds some additional features for dependency management, but probably won't be as up-to-date as the official script compiler https://github.com/holgerbrandl/kscript

[Michael Grigoryan]

Thanks for your help