java - Choosing the correct JRE version in Gradle with Eclipse

Question

I'm using Gradle with the Eclipse plugin to generate project files for my project, but I can't get it to put the correct JRE version in .classpath. I can add a JRE container, but I can't figure out how to remove the default one - and since this project is shared between developers, who might have varying defaults set in Eclipse, I want to control this manually.

The way I think this should work, is like so:

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'eclipse'

sourceCompatibility = 1.6

Since targetCompatibility is the same as sourceCompatibility, I expect this setup to go to the Eclipse settings, find a JRE that matches the source version (and yes, there is one on my machine - both a JRE installation and a separate JDK installation) and go with it.

Instead, however, it picks the default, which on my machine happens to be Java 7.

I tried adding some stuff to the Eclipse configuration:

eclipse {
    jdt {
        sourceCompatibility = 1.6 // tried with and without this
    }
    classpath {
        // tried various ways to remove the old entry, among them:
        file.beforeMerged { p -> p.entries.clear() }

        // and then I add the "correct" one
        containers 'org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER/org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.ui.launcher.StandardVMType/jdk1.6.0_45'
    }
}

Doing things like this I end up with two JRE containers in .classpath:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
    <classpathentry kind="output" path="bin"/>
    <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER" exported="true"/>
    <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER/org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.ui.launcher.StandardVMType/jdk1.6.0_45" exported="true"/>
</classpath>

How do I tell gradle that I only want a JRE 1.6 container, and not the default one too?

---

Some constraints on what I'm after:

• The default setting in Eclipse should be irrelevant
• Preferrably, I want the script to look up the container - in the above script, the string defining the container to add is user-dependent. I would like it much better to look among "installed JREs" for a version matching that of sourceConfiguration - I'm OK with throwing an error if no such JRE is installed in Eclipse.

Answer 1

I've ended up solving this in a slightly more manual way than I wanted - but at least it works.

In order to separate the settings from the implementation, each developer has a gradle.properties file which is not checked into version control. This file contains the following information (on my workstation):

javaVersion=1.6
javaPath=C:/Program/Java/jdk1.6.0_45
jdkName=jdk1.6.0_45

In the build script, i then do the following to get all the configuration correct:

// Set sourceCompatibility
if (project.hasProperty('javaVersion')) {
    project.sourceCompatibility = project.javaVersion
}

// Set bootClasspath - but wait until after evaluation, to have all tasks defined
project.afterEvaluate {
    if (project.hasProperty('javaPath')) {
        project.tasks.withType(AbstractCompile, {
            it.options.bootClasspath = "${project.javaPath}/jre/lib/rt.jar"
        })
    }
}

// Configure Eclipse .classpath
project.eclipse.classpath.file.whenMerged { Classpath cp ->
    if (project.hasProperty('jdkName') {
        cp.entries.findAll { it.path.contains('JRE_CONTAINER') }.each {
            it.path += "/org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.ui.launcher.StandardVMType/$project.jdkName"
        }
    }
}

So far I've used it in a couple of projects and it's worked, so I guess it's at least quite portable - but it might be necessary to make slight modifications to make it work for others.