This message was deleted.

No, that's chicken-and-egg. To know which tasks are going to be executed all plugins have to be applied and all configuration done, so that the task dependencies can be evaluated, so when the information is available, you cannot change that anymore. You could check for the explicitly requested tasks in

gradle.startParameters

but be aware that there you will find exactly what was typed, so could be abbreviated for example. Better always apply the plugin and then do according configuration like using task's

onlyIf { ... }

or similar to skip the tasks.