Mendix plugin for Gradle

This plugin helps you to work with a Mendix project using Gradle. It provides wrappers for the Mendix tools as mxbuild and mx, making interaction version agnostic. The plugin also provides run and distribution options. The plugin works on Windows and Linux. Mac support will be added when CLI tools are available.

Experimental

This is an experimental project and comes without warranty and support.

Goal of this project is to experiment with interaction, automation and distribution of Mendix application. Please provide feedback on these topics that could be addressed by this plugin.

Feedback on your use-case and experience is welcome though as with this project I try to experiment on a different approach on interaction, automation and shipping a Mendix app.

Version support for Mendix tools and runtime

This plugin covers two items

• Wrap Mendix CLI tools for easy use
• Build a Mendix app distribution

CLI tool support

The Gradle plugin supports Mendix CLI tools for various versions and operating systems.

Mendix Version	OS	Notes
All	Windows	On Windows all versions are supported when they are installed.
> 9.16	Linux	For Linux tools tools are always downloaded from CDN. Starting this version tools are compiled as native Linux executables.
> 9.23	Windows	Starting this version Windows tooling can be donwloaded from CDN. In case not available locally.

Note: when running Mendix tooling on Linux it depends on system library libuci-dev to be installed.

Note: MacOS is not supported as StudioPro Mac doesn't ship CLI tools.

App distribution support

Version 10.11 of Mendix runtime includes a boot file config option (see mxWriteConfig and mxRun) which doesn't depend on external tools like M2EE Tools or Docker Build Pack to run an application.

Starting version 10.11 the mxRun and mxDistZip commands are supported to create a Mendix app distribution package.

Installation

To enable the use of this plugin it first must be made available to Gradle. Since the plugin is not released into the Gradle Plugin Hub it needs to be available in the local M2 cache.

Check out this project and the compile and build. The build needs Java 11 to compile. For Gradle make this available with Java on the PATH or set JAVA_HOME. The execute

gradlew.bat build publishToMavenLocal

Create or configure a Mendix project

To use the plugin your Mendix project needs to be a Gradle project. To create a project execute

gradle.bat init --type basic --dsl groovy

Answer the values and check if the project is created, gradlew.bat and build.gradle must exist.

Now open settings.gradle to add a bit of plugin management because the plugin is only available from the local M2 repo. Add the following at the top of the file:

pluginManagement {
    repositories {
        mavenLocal()
        mavenCentral()
        gradlePluginPortal()
    }
}

Then open build.gradle and add

plugins {
    id "application"
    id "distribution"
    id "com.mendixlabs.mendix-gradle-plugin" version "0.0.6"
}
 
mendix {
    mendixVersion = "10.11.0.36903"
    mprFileName = "App.mpr"
}

See Extension configuration for plugin configuration details.

For a new project init the project with

gradlew.bat mxEnsureModeler mxInit

For an existing project use the Mendix version that is used for this project and the Mendix version of the project. In case you are not sure, use

gradlew.bat mxGetVersion

Versioning

The plugin uses the version value from gradle.properties in the build and distribution tasks as input.

Usage

Use gradlew.bat tasks to view which tasks are available. It is also possible to specify custom tasks.

Note: task dependencies are not set for mxbuild. Mxbuild takes quite some time and this plugin doesn't contain a good way yet to determine if the project and its associated files have changed. Therefore it is required to run mxbuild manually when the project source has changed.

Build an app

gradlew.bat mxbuild

Run an app

Assumes mxbuild is executed.

gradlew.bat mxEnsureRuntime mxWriteConfigs mxDeployMda mxRun

Distribute an app

Assumes mxbuild is executed.

gradlew.bat mxEnsureRuntime mxWriteConfigs mxStartScripts mxDistZip

To see the content of the distribution browse to build\distributions and open the zip. To run the distribution in this project execute.

gradlew.bat installMxDist
build\install\<app-name>\bin\start.bat

License

Copyright 2024 Mendix Technology BV

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

The license is included in the project as LICENSE.