I am working with a third-party multi-module gradle build that relies on having a plugin jar on the filesystem next to the project.

It looks something like this

build.gradle
settings.gradle
third-party/custom/gradle/plugins/theirplugin-1.2.3.jar
  |--server1/build.gradle
  |--server2/build.gradle

Each of the sub-project has an apply plugin: their-plugin

The build.gradle references it with:

buildscript {
  dependencies {
    classpath files("third-party/custom/gradle/plugins/theirplugin-1.2.3.jar")
  }
}

Everything but the third-party directory is checked in. The contents of the third-party directory are in a zip in Artifactory because it is 1 GB in size (!),

The third-party zip is defined in the main dependencies block and I have a separate task to extract it to disk using copy from fileTree.

The problem is that the sub-projects will only resolve the plugin if the third-party zip has already been downloaded and extracted so the build fails before it can download and extract the zip.

Can I do this download and extract before gradle resolves the sub-projects? Perhaps in the settings.gradle instead?