Gradle Plugins for Corda and Cordapps

The projects at this level of the project are gradle plugins for cordapps and are published to Maven Local with the rest of the Corda libraries.

From the beginning of development for Corda 4.0 these plugins have been split from the main Corda repository. Any changes to gradle plugins pre-4.0 should be on a release branch within the Corda repo. Any changes after 3.0 belong in this repository.

Version number

To modify the version number edit the root build.gradle.

Until v4.0, the version number was tracking the Corda version number it was built for. Eg; Corda 4.0 was built as 4.0.x. This was broken from v4.3 onwards (Corda 4.3 and plugins 5.0). The major version number will change when there is a breaking change, for example when the minimum (major) version of Gradle changes.

Corda 5 requires Corda Gradle Plugins 7.x.

Getting started

You will need JVM 8 installed and on the path to run and install these plugins. However, some plugins may also require a Java 11 toolchain for testing purposes.

Installing locally

To install locally for testing a new build against Corda you can run the following from the project root;

./gradlew install

Release process

The version number of the "bleeding edge" in master is always a -SNAPSHOT version. To create a new release, a maintainer must create a new branch off the latest commit in this release, remove the -SNAPSHOT from the version number, create a tag and then run the publish to artifactory task for the created tag in Jenkins. The version number in master is then advanced to the next -SNAPSHOT number.

Using the plugins.

These plugins are published to R3's Artifactory. More recently, they are also published to Gradle's own plugins repository and can be imported into your projects using Gradle's plugins DSL.

The plugins themselves fall into two categories: those intended for developing CorDapps, and those which are primarily used to build Corda itself.

Plugins for CorDapp development.

• net.corda.plugins.cordapp-cpk2
  This plugin generates CPK-format CorDapps that are compatible with Corda 5, and supercedes Corda's original cordapp plugin. It will package your CorDapp classes into an OSGi bundle (a jar whose manifest contains OSGi metadata), and then package that bundle together with its dependencies into a .cpk archive. Dependencies which are added to Gradle's cordaProvided, cordaRuntimeOnly and cordapp configurations are excluded from the .cpk file. Both the OSGi bundle and the CPK archive are signed. The plugin also provides a cordapp Gradle extension so that you can configure your CorDapp's metadata.

  ^{Requires Gradle 7.2}

• net.corda.plugins.cordapp
  This plugin packages your CorDapp classes into a single jar file, along with the contents of all of the jar's dependent jars. Dependencies which are added to Gradle's cordaCompile, cordaRuntime and cordapp configurations are excluded from this packaging. The final jar is then signed. It also provides a cordapp Gradle extension so that you can configure your CorDapp's metadata. This metadata is currently optional, but you are strongly advised to provide it.

  ^{Requires Gradle 5.6}

• net.corda.plugins.cordformation
  This plugin provides Cordform, Dockerform and DockerImage Gradle tasks for creating test deployments of multiple Corda nodes and their CorDapps. It also invokes the Network Bootstrapper over the deployment for you, and provides you with a runnodes script to boot it all up afterwards.

  ^{Requires Gradle 5.1}

• net.corda.plugins.quasar-utils
  This plugin configures a Gradle module to use Quasar. Specifically:

  • It allows you to specify the Maven group and version of the quasar-core artifact to use.
  • Adds the quasar-core artifact, along with all of its transitive dependencies, to Gradle's cordaRuntimeOnly configuration.
  • Adds the quasar-core artifact to Gradle's cordaProvided configuration without any of its transitive dependencies.
  • Applies the quasar-core Java agent to all of the module's JavaExec tasks.
  • Applies the quasar-core Java agent to all of the module's Test tasks.
  • Provides a quasar Gradle extension so that you can configure which packages the Quasar Java agent should not instrument at runtime.

  ^{Requires Gradle 7.2}

Internal Corda plugins.

These plugins are unlikely to be useful to CorDapp developers outside of R3.

• net.corda.plugins.api-scanner
  This plugin scans the public and protected classes inside a Gradle module's "primary" jar artifact and writes a summary of their public and protected methods and fields into an output file. The "primary" jar is assumed by default to be the one without an archiveClassifier, although this is configurable. Its goal is to alert Corda developers to accidental breaks in our public ABI for those Corda modules we have declared to be "stable", and is used by the Continuous Integration builds.

  ^{Requires Gradle 7.2}

• net.corda.plugins.jar-filter
  This plugin allows us to delete certain annotated classes, methods and fields from the compiled byte-code inside a jar file. It can also rewrite Kotlin classes' @kotlin.Metadata annotations to make them consistent again with their revised byte-code. It has been successfully tested with Kotlin 1.4.32 and 1.7.0.

  ^{Requires Gradle 7.2}

• net.corda.plugins.publish-utils
  Here be Dragons! This plugin helps configure Gradle's maven-publish plugin to publish Corda modules to Bintray and to R3's Artifactory. However, its workings probably shouldn't be allowed and they should most definitely never be copied. Unfortunately, it is heavily constrained by how JFrog's Bintray and Artifactory plugins themselves work, and so we're currently stuck with it "as is". It is useful though - just shut your eyes and hold your nose.

  ^{Requires Gradle 6.6}