Run Java CLI from Gradle

30 Jan 2025 cli

Sometimes you might need to execute a Java CLI from Gradle. I was playing around with Playwright and wanted to use the codegen tool to gen java from recording a surfing session. There are instructions for making this work with Maven but not Gradle. The trick with Gradle though is to create a new task in groovy and then exec that with the gradle wrapper.

Assuming you have added the playwright dependency to build.gradle then add the following new task

// Usage: ./gradlew playwright --args="help"
task playwright(type: JavaExec) {
  classpath sourceSets.test.runtimeClasspath
  mainClass = 'com.microsoft.playwright.CLI'
}

and then from the shell ./gradlew playwright --args="codegen www.google.com".

To sum up add a new task of type JavaExec with a useful name and supply the FQN as the mainClass.

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