Run Dynamodb local as part of a Gradle Java project

Question

I am trying to run DynamoDB local for testing purposes. I followed the steps amazon provides for setting it up and running the jar by itself works fine (link to amazon's tutorial Here). However, the tutorial doesn't go over running the jar within your own project. I don't want all the other developers to have to grab a jar and run it locally every time they test their code.

That is where my question comes in. I've had a real hard time finding any examples online of how to configure a Gradle project to run the DynamoDB local server as part of my tests. I found the following maven example https://github.com/awslabs/aws-dynamodb-examples/blob/master/src/test/java/com/amazonaws/services/dynamodbv2/DynamoDBLocalFixture.java#L32 and am trying to convert it to a Gradle, but am getting errors for all of com.amazonaws.services.dynamodbv2.local import statements they are using. The errors are that the resource cannot be found.

I went into their project's pom and put the following into my build.gradle file to emulate it.

//dynamodb local dependencies
testCompile('com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-dynamodb:1.10.42')
testCompile('com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-cloudwatch:1.10.42')
testCompile('com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk:1.3.0')
testCompile('com.amazonaws:amazon-kinesis-client:1.6.1')
testCompile('com.amazonaws:amazon-kinesis-connectors:1.1.1')
testCompile('com.amazonaws:dynamodb-streams-kinesis-adapter:1.0.2')
testCompile('com.amazonaws:DynamoDBLocal:1.10.5.1')

The import statements still fail. Here is an example of one that fails.

import com.amazonaws.services.dynamodbv2.local.embedded.DynamoDBEmbedded;

TL;DR

Has anyone managed to get the DynamoDB local JAR to execute as part of a Gradle project or have a link to a good tutorial (it doesn't have to be the tutorial I linked to).

Answer 1

We have DynamoDB local working with gradle. Here's what you need to add to your gradle.build file:

For gradle 4.x and below versions

1) Add to the repositories section:

    maven {
        url 'http://dynamodb-local.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/release'
    }

2) Add to the dependencies section (assuming you're using this for your tests):

    testCompile group: 'com.amazonaws', name: 'DynamoDBLocal', version: 1.11.0

3) These next two steps are the tricky part. First copy the native files to a directory:

task copyNativeDeps(type: Copy) {
    from (configurations.testCompile) {
        include "*.dylib"
        include "*.so"
        include "*.dll"
    }
    into 'build/libs'
}

4) Then make sure you include this directory (build/libs in our case) in the java library path like so:

test.dependsOn copyNativeDeps
test.doFirst {
    systemProperty "java.library.path", 'build/libs'
}

Now you should be able to run ./gradlew test and have your tests hit your local DynamoDB.