A Gradle project can contain artifacts we want to publish. An artifact can be a ZIP or JAR archive file or any other file. We can define one or more artifacts in one project. Thus, we don't have to create two different projects if we want to have two different artifacts from the same source tree.

In Gradle, we group artifacts using configurations. We used configurations to define dependencies for our project, but now we will use the configurations to group our artifacts that can be dependencies for others. So a configuration can contain both dependencies and artifacts. If we apply the Java plugin to our project, we get a configuration named archives, that contains the default JAR artifact for the project.

In the following example Gradle build file, we use the Java plugin. We add a task to display the filename of the artifact that belongs to the archives configuration. The following code shows this:

apply plugin: 'java'

// Set the archivesBaseName property,...