How to make Gradle add Lombok to its Project and external dependencies libraries?

Question

I created a Java project in Eclipse Neon. I used Buildship 1.0.21 to import the project as a Gradle project and ran the wrapper and init commands to generate the build, settings and wrapper files.

The project has an empty source folder because I am trying to solve a similar problem on a more complicated project and taking the divide and conquer approach - just add Lombok dependency.

Here is my build.gradle as instructed on the lombok website:

apply plugin: 'java'

dependencies {
    compileOnly "org.projectlombok:lombok:1.16.12"
}

and gradle-wrapper.properties if needed:

distributionBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
distributionPath=wrapper/dists
zipStoreBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
zipStorePath=wrapper/dists
distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-3.2.1-bin.zip /* <--- tried other versions too */

and I ran the jar file to install it on my eclipse. If I add the jar manually via "Java Build Path" it works but I want Gradle to handle this for me. When I refresh the project nothing happens - there is no lombok jar under "Projects and External Dependencies" and code relying on lombok will give errors.

There is another project I have which does have it there and I don't know what I did differently but I know it's possible.

Answer 1

I managed to solve this after trial and error. The build.gradle file must add the jcenter repository:

repositories {
    jcenter()
}

Why this is the case and why this is not mentioned anywhere I don't know. But for now this is what works.