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What do you mean exactly when you say "programmatically creating Gradle projects"?

Well, I'd like to have a project that I can refer to via

project(":name")

in another project's

build.gradle.kts

, but I don't want that project to exist "on disk", like by having its own

build.gradle.kts

file.

I hope you just want to depend on

project(":name")

but not configure it, because that is the same discouraged bad practice as using

allprojects { ... }

or

subprojects { ... }

for the same reasons.

The longer story is that I'm creating Gradle project template for developing plugins for an application. For debugging convenience, I'd like to provide an application

runConfiguration

via the

idea-ext

Gradle plugin that runs the application with the plugin loaded. But my Gradle project for the plugin should not actually contain a project for the application the plugin is for. Still, I need to refer to the application's JAR as part of the run configuration.

What do you need a project for then? Just create a configuration (named or detached) that you use to resolve the application jar and its dependencies and use that for the generated run configuration.

Well, if I just refer to something like

project(":name")

, Gradle warns me

Project with path ':name' could not be found in root project 'app-plugin'

.

Yeah, you still have to declare it in the settings plugin.

I need the project for the module path of the run configuration, like

moduleName = project(":cli").idea.module.name

Where would the module name come from in that

cli

project?

Sorry, "cli" is just "name" from my earlier examples.

I got that, doesn't change my question 🙂

Then I didn't get the question 🙂

Where would the module name come from in that

name

project?

No idea, I assume it's some idea-ext plugin magic.

If you want an idea module, you need to have a Gradle project. But as you said you don't want a Gradle project, you will have no idea module.

Ok, let's get back a step. In the end, what I'm trying to achieve is to programmatically create an IntelliJ run configuration that has JARs in its classpath that are not a dependency of any of the Gradle projects I currently have.

Or actually, the moduleName is maybe the name of the module of your actual project with the plugin code.

I'll give the custom configuration approach a try.

Exactly