When using the Gradle war plugin you’re enabled to declare providedCompile dependencies to tell the compiler to include those dependencies in the compile classpath, but to not make Gradle include them in the packaged .war artifact. Your build.gradle script might look like this, e.g. for a webapp using GWT: apply plugin: 'war' dependencies { ... providedCompile 'com.google.gwt:gwt-user:2.5.1' ... } The dependency shown in the example has some own dependencies, which can be shown by using the :dependencies task.