I am trying to consume the locally published export-Plugin snapshot for grails 7. On startup of my demo consumer application I get the following startup error:

Caused by: grails.plugins.exceptions.PluginException: Failed to initialize class [grails.plugins.export.TestController] from plugin [export] : grails.plugins.export.TestController

...

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: grails.plugins.export.TestController

The controller in the plugin is for demonstration purposes only, so I tried to exclude it from the plugin:

def pluginExcludes = [
      "grails-app/views/error.gsp",
"grails-app/grails/plugins/export/*"
  ]

and in build.gradle (presumably leading to the ClassNotFoundException above):

jar {
    List excludes = ['UrlMappings', 'TestController']
    excludes.each {
        exclude "**/${it}*.class"
    }
}

What do I need to change so that my grails application does not try to instantiate the controller of the plugin (because it should not be there anyway)?

This looks suspicious, is the controller not in

grails-app/controllers/grails/plugins/export/*

? (note the missing

controllers

in your example)

def pluginExcludes = [
    "grails-app/views/error.gsp",
    "grails-app/grails/plugins/export/*"
]

ah, yes, fixed that, but still does not work. the grails-plugin.xml looks like this:

<plugin name='export' version='7.0.0-SNAPSHOT' grailsVersion='7.0.0 > *'>
  <type>grails.plugins.export.ExportGrailsPlugin</type>
  <authorEmail>grails.plugin.collective@gmail.com</authorEmail>
  <dependsOn />
  <author>Grails Plugin Collective</author>
  <documentation><https://gpc.github.io/export/></documentation>
  <description>This plugin offers export functionality supporting different formats e.g. CSV, Excel, Open Document Spreadsheet, PDF and XML 
and can be extended to add additional formats. 
</description>
  <title>Grails Export Plugin</title>
  <version />
  <grailsVersion>7.0.0 > *</grailsVersion>
  <license>APACHE</license>
  <pluginExcludes>[grails-app/views/error.gsp, grails-app/controllers/grails/plugins/export/*]</pluginExcludes>
  <issueManagement system='Github' url='<https://github.com/gpc/export/issues>' />
  <organization name='Grails Plugin Collective' url='<https://github.com/gpc>' />
  <name>export</name>
  <scm url='<https://github.com/gpc/export>' />
  <resources>
    <resource>grails.plugins.export.TestController</resource>
    <resource>grails.plugins.export.UrlMappings</resource>
    <resource>grails.export.Application</resource>
    <resource>grails.plugins.export.ExportService</resource>
    <resource>grails.plugins.export.ExportTagLib</resource>
  </resources>
</plugin>

This is an example from `grails-core`:

def pluginExcludes = [
            '**/com/demo/**',
            'grails-app/views/**',
            '**/*.gsp'
    ]

Thanks for the pointers, this worked for me now:

def pluginExcludes = [
        "grails-app/views/error.gsp",
		"**/grails/plugins/export/*Controller*",
		"**/grails/plugins/export/UrlMappings*",
    ]