Writing a buildSrc Gradle plugin that can be published - plugins

Question

I'm writing a custom Gradle plugin for my company to assist with integration tests of our product. My team wants to have the plugin be built with and used in the main product build (like a 'buildSrc' plugin would), but also need the plugin to be published as an artifact for other teams to use in integration with our product.
If I try and include it as a standalone plugin in the settings.gradle file and then also include it in the buildscript as a dependency, it obviously does not work because the buildscript block is interpreted first.
I also tried running another build from within the buildscript like so:
buildscript {
def connection = GradleConnector.newConnector()
.forProjectDirectory(file("${project.projectDir}/theplugin"))
.connect()
try {
connection.newBuild()
.forTasks('clean', 'build', 'install')
.run()
} finally {
connection.close()
}
repositories {
mavenLocal()
...
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.company.product.gradle.theplugin'
}
}
This causes the plugin to be built and placed in the local Maven repo, but then the initial Gradle build fails directly afterward because it can't resolve the newly built archive. If I run it again, it works. I don't understand this behavior.
I'm probably going down a rabbit hole with this approach. Is there a way to make this work and in a less 'hacky' way?

Answer 1

I discovered a hacky way to accomplish this: symlink the plugins to the buildSrc (on *nix at least).
project directory
project/
buildSrc/ -> gradle_plugins/
gradle_plugins/
pluginA/
pluginB/
...
build.gradle
settings.gradle
...
build.gradle
settings.gradle
project/settings.gradle
include 'gradle_plugins:pluginA'
include 'gradle_plugins:pluginB'
...
project/gradle_plugins/settings.gradle
include 'pluginA'
include 'pluginB'
...
project/gradle_plugins/build.gradle
...
rootProject.dependencies {
runtime project(path)
}
...

Answer 2

The way I'm solving this is the following:
Regular multi project build with buildSrc/myPlugin/.. Within my build process I call ./gradlew -b buildSrc/myPlugin/build.gradle uploadArchives (or whichever task you use to publish your maven artifact).
Due to the "official" hack of having to add the gradle plugin to the runtime dependencies of the root project this step would fail. So I surround it with a try catch. I feel that is not perfect but it seems to work.