How to share a common build.gradle via a repository?

I'm looking at porting a maven build to gradle. One feature of maven is pom inheritance whereby I can declare a variety of common behaviour in a pom, publish that to a repository and then use that via the <parent> element in a concrete project.

My Q is simply whether there is an equivalent behaviour in gradle?

I've previously done this in ant+ivy by importing a common build.xml which relied on either having already checked out the location of the common build.xml from source control or using something like svn:externals. I can repeat this approach without any real difficulty but this seems to be one thing maven does quite nicely so it would be nice to see something similar in gradle.

There are two possibilities:

1. Publish a build script to a web server, and include it with apply from: "http://path/to/script.gradle"

2. Write a Gradle plugin, publish it as a Jar to a Maven or Ivy repository, and include it with:

   buildscript {
       repositories { .. }
       dependencies "mygroup:myplugin:1.0"
   }
   
   apply plugin: "myplugin"
   

The second option is more complicated, but also somewhat more powerful. For example, plugin Jars will be cached, whereas remote build scripts currently won't. In general, I recommend to start with 1., and move to 2. if and once it becomes necessary. In the future, Gradle will likely offer a mechanism which combines the ease of use of 1. with the advantages of 2.

My current solution is option 3; package the common scripts into a jar as resources and then unjar during the buildscript section like so

buildscript {
    repositories {
        // enterprise repo here
    }
    dependencies { 
        classpath 'com.foo.bar:common-build:0.1.0-SNAPSHOT'
    }
    dependencies {
        ant.unjar src: configurations.classpath.singleFile, dest: 'build/gradle'
    }
}

apply from: 'build/gradle/common.gradle'

This seems to do what I want.

Buildings on Matt’s solution, I find the following to be a bit cleaner:

buildscript {
  repositories {
    <your repos>
  }
  dependencies {
    classpath '<your jar>'
  }
}

afterEvaluate { project -> // afterEvaluate for resolving the build script dependency
  apply from: project.buildscript.classLoader.getResource('path/to/your/resource/in/the/jar').toURI()
}

Just my two cents. :-)