Gradle: Could not find method providedCompile()

Question

How are this and this build file able to use providedCompile?

thufir@doge:~/NetBeansProjects/gradleEAR$ 
thufir@doge:~/NetBeansProjects/gradleEAR$ gradle clean

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* Where:
Build file '/home/thufir/NetBeansProjects/gradleEAR/build.gradle' line: 40

* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating root project 'gradleEAR'.
> Could not find method providedCompile() for arguments [javax:javaee-api:7.0] on object of type org.gradle.api.internal.artifacts.dsl.dependencies.DefaultDependencyHandler.

* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

Total time: 12.721 secs
thufir@doge:~/NetBeansProjects/gradleEAR$ 

plugins {
    id 'com.gradle.build-scan' version '1.8' 
    id 'java'
    id 'application'
    id 'ear'
}

mainClassName = 'net.bounceme.doge.json.Main'

buildScan {
    licenseAgreementUrl = 'https://gradle.com/terms-of-service'
    licenseAgree = 'yes'
}

repositories {
    jcenter()
}

jar {
    manifest {
        attributes 'Main-Class': 'net.bounceme.doge.json.Main'
    }
}

task fatJar(type: Jar) {
    baseName = project.name + '-all'
    from { configurations.compile.collect { it.isDirectory() ? it : zipTree(it) } }
    with jar
    manifest {
        attributes 'Implementation-Title': 'Gradle Quickstart', 'Implementation-Version': '3.4.0'
        attributes 'Main-Class': 'net.bounceme.doge.json.Main'
    }
}

dependencies {
    compile group: 'javax.json', name: 'javax.json-api', version: '1.1'
    compile group: 'org.glassfish', name: 'javax.json', version: '1.1'
    providedCompile 'javax:javaee-api:7.0'
}

In reference to:

How does Gradle resolve the javaee-api dependency to build an EAR?

Solution 1

providedCompile is shipped with war plugin. So you need to add:

plugins {
  // ...
  id 'war'
}

Solution 2

You can get this error if you have a higher version of Gradle installed. For example you have:

gradle --version

giving

Gradle 5.0

but the project expects Gradle 2.10 or some other lower version of Gradle.

To solve this first try to use Gradle wrapper ./gradlew (if included with project) instead of locally installed gradle. Or install a correct version of gradle and make it available using path variable.