Re: How to exclude some classes from jar The easiest way to fit your tasks into the build lifecycle would probably be to add a dependency on your 'sub-jar' from the jar task: jar.dependsOn << caaJar This should work since there are no dependencies between the two jars you're building. If excludes are not provided, then no files will be excluded. If excludes are provided, then files must not match any exclude pattern to be processed. If you are developing a library, you have to be aware that this information is not published, and so sometimes an exclude … The manifest for this JAR archive.
This dependency is called transitive dependency. It will product 3 jars: root.jar, projectA.jar and projectB.jar.

Then they are all be published to my local maven repository. The scenario can be like 1. thx raffael for your answer. Gradle script downloads the JAR and the dependency JAR when gradle script run. unfortunately it doesn't work that way either. The question is that I don’t want to produce the root.jar, how to prevent to generate it and not publish to repository. Gradle script downloads the JAR from maven central or any other location which we specify.

the metadata was wrong — and therefore should never be considered.
'testRuntime' uses the libs/classpaths from runtime, which i want to prevent. By this, you tell Gradle that a dependency between two modules is never needed — i.e. Sometimes we come in the situation to exclude transitive dependency.