Gradle clean<customTask> not working

Question

I have a custom task to do a Websphere EJBDeploy. I have defined the inputs and ouputs, and get successful incremental compilation, but I can't get the automatically generated clean task to work properly.

According to docs, for a custom task named "ejbDeploy" with a defined output, a cleanEjbDeploy task should be automatically generated.

Pattern: clean<TaskName>: Cleans the output files of a task.

So here's my custom task:

task ejbDeploy(dependsOn: 'jar'){
    srcFile = file(jar.archivePath)
    destDir = new File("build/ejbDeploy")

    inputs.file srcFile
    outputs.dir destDir

    def cp = project.files(
        project.sourceSets.main.output.classesDir,
        project.sourceSets.main.resources,
        project.configurations.runtime
        ).getAsPath()

    doLast{
        destDir.mkdirs()

        exec{
            executable = wasEjbDeploy
            workingDir = destDir
            args = [
                jar.archivePath,
                ".",
                jar.archiveName,
                "-cp",
                cp
            ]
        }   
    }
}

Anyone have any ideas as to why the clean rule isn't working?

[Edit]

Here's the full (anonymized) file contents (this has changed since initial question post):

version = '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
group = 'com.company'

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenLocal()
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath group: 'name.benjaminAbbitt', name: 'WASEjbDeploy', version: '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
    }
}

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'eclipse'
apply plugin: 'base'

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
    mavenLocal()
}

dependencies {
    compile 'javax.mail:mail:1.4.5'
    compile 'log4j:log4j:1.2.16'
    compile files(fileTree(dir: 'lib', includes: ['*.jar']) )
}

task ejbDeploy(type:name.benjaminAbbitt.WASEjbDeploy, dependsOn: 'jar'){
    wasEjbDeployPath = wasEjbDeploy
}

Here's the relevant chunk of "$gradle tasks"

build - Assembles and tests this project.
buildDependents - Assembles and tests this project and all projects that depend
on it.
buildNeeded - Assembles and tests this project and all projects it depends on.
classes - Assembles the main classes.
clean - Deletes the build directory.
jar - Assembles a jar archive containing the main classes.
testClasses - Assembles the test classes.

Documentation tasks
-------------------
javadoc - Generates Javadoc API documentation for the main source code.

Help tasks
----------
dependencies - Displays the dependencies of project ':project'.
help - Displays a help message
projects - Displays the sub-projects of project ':project'.
properties - Displays the properties of project ':project'.
tasks - Displays the tasks runnable from project ':project' (some of the
displayed tasks may belong to subprojects).

IDE tasks
---------
cleanEclipse - Cleans all Eclipse files.
eclipse - Generates all Eclipse files.

Verification tasks
------------------
check - Runs all checks.
test - Runs the unit tests.

Other tasks
-----------
ejbDeploy

Rules
-----
Pattern: build<ConfigurationName>: Assembles the artifacts of a configuration.
Pattern: upload<ConfigurationName>: Assembles and uploads the artifacts belongin
g to a configuration.
Pattern: clean<TaskName>: Cleans the output files of a task.

To see all tasks and more detail, run with --all.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 3.321 secs

Answer 1

The clean rule is provided by the base plugin. Since many other plugins (e.g. java) already apply the base plugin, you typically don't have to apply the base plugin yourself. But in case:

apply plugin: "base"