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You are right that by default the exploded war is not built, because that would be an unnecessary step and make things slower if a war should actually be built. But you can easily add a task that does it without the need to first build and then extract it like this in Kotlin DSL

val explodedWar by tasks.registering(Sync::class) {
    with(war)
    into(layout.buildDirectory.dir("exploded-war"))
}

(There could be syntax errors, written on mobile)