java - Can I force the order of dependencies in my classpath with Gradle?

Question

A project runs on Google App Engine. The project has dependency that uses a class that can't be invoked on App Engine due to security constraints (it's not on the whitelist). My (very hacky) solution was to just copy a modified version of that class into my project (matching the original Class's name and package) that doesn't need the restricted class. This works on both dev and live, I assume because my source appears in the classpath before my external dependencies.

To make it a bit cleaner, I decided to put my modified version of that class into it's own project that can be packaged up in a jar and published for anyone else to use should they face this problem.

Here's my build.gradle:

// my jar that has 'fixed' version of Class.
compile files('path/to/my-hack-0.0.1.jar')

// dependency that includes class that won't run on appengine
compile 'org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch:1.4.4'

On my local dev server, this works fine, the code finds my hacked version of the class first at runtime. On live, for some unknown reason, the version in the elasticsearch dependency is loaded first.

I know having two versions of the same class in the classpath isn't ideal but I was hoping I could reliably force my version to be at the start of the classpath. Any ideas? Alternatively, is there a better way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

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