Gradle Build for Spring Framework and SLF4J without Apache Commons Logging

Gradle build system supports Transitive Dependency Management.

It's very useful when you depend on a library, say Spring Framework, that uses Apache Commons Logging (artifact commons-logging:commons-logging), but you want to use another library like SLF4J and want to exclude Commons Logging.

Here is the Gradle build to exclude the commons-logging transitive dependency.

repositories {
mavenCentral()
}

configurations {
compile
runtime
all*.exclude group: 'commons-logging' // this is where we exclude
}

dependencies {
compile group: 'org.springframework', name: 'spring-web', version: '3.0.5.RELEASE'
compile group: 'org.slf4j', name: 'slf4j-api', version: '1.6.1'
runtime group: 'org.slf4j', name: 'slf4j-jdk14', version: '1.6.1'
runtime group: 'org.slf4j', name: 'jcl-over-slf4j', version: '1.6.1'
}

// Example usage: Copy dependencies
// e.g. to the Google App Engine WEB-INF/lib directory
task copyDependencies << {
copy {
from configurations.compile
from configurations.runtime
into 'war/WEB-INF/lib'
}
}