Building Mule Applications with Gradle

Some time ago I discussed the advantages of building applications with gradle against maven or other build systems. I have been working since on a gradle plugin that enables Mule ESB users to build their apps with gradle as an alternative to maven.

While I continue to add features to this plugin, it is currently stable enough to build any community-based mule project and the plugin is open source based on the Apache 2 license. The url for the plugin and install instructions is the following:

https://github.com/mulesoft/mule-gradle-plugin

The project aims to cover all the features the current Mule plugin for maven does and some other use cases that might be difficult for the maven plugin to achieve. The plugin is oriented for both community and enterprise users of Mule ESB.

Using the Plugin With MuleStudio

In order to enable an existing MuleStudio project, you need to follow the following steps:

1. Install the gradle plugin into your plugin repositories. The README file suggest how to install it and use it in your local maven repo.
2. Create a MuleStudio project or choose the one you'd need to enable with gradle.
3. Add a build.gradle file in the root of your project with the following contents:

This base build script may be customized to include any dependencies your project may have but bare in mind that most of the libraries included in the Mule ESB runtime are already there in the 'provided' scope.

To upgrade your MuleStudio classpath automatically, you just need to run:

$ gradle studio

You need to run the previous command every time you update dependencies in your project. The mule version needs to match the version of the runtime you're using.

To build your app so it is deployable in a standalone studio, you just need to run:

$ gradle mulezip

This will place the deployable zip file in the build directory. The plugin is as well capable of running the app in an embedded mule instance or installing it into a Mule ESB instance installed on the same host.