Building an all-in-one Jar in Gradle with the Kotlin DSL

To build a “fat” Jar of your Java or Kotlin project that contains all the dependencies within a single file, you can use the shadow Gradle plugin.

I found it hard to find clear documentation on how it works using the Gradle Kotlin DSL (with a build.gradle.kts instead of build.gradle) so here is how I did it:

$ cat build.gradle.kts 
import com.github.jengelman.gradle.plugins.shadow.tasks.ShadowJar

plugins {
    kotlin("jvm") version "1.3.41"
    id("com.github.johnrengelman.shadow") version "5.1.0"
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    implementation(kotlin("stdlib"))
}

tasks.withType<ShadowJar>() {
    manifest {
        attributes["Main-Class"] = "HelloKt"
    }
}

$ cat src/main/kotlin/Hello.kt 
fun main() {
    println("Hello!")
}

$ gradle wrapper --gradle-version 5.5
BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 0s
1 actionable task: 1 executed

$ ./gradlew shadowJar
BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 1s
2 actionable tasks: 2 executed

$ java -jar build/libs/hello-all.jar 
Hello!