[java] How do I exclude all instances of a transitive dependency when using Gradle?

My gradle project uses the application plugin to build a jar file. As part of the runtime transitive dependencies, I end up pulling in org.slf4j:slf4j-log4j12. (It's referenced as a sub-transitive dependency in at least 5 or 6 other transitive dependencies - this project is using spring and hadoop, so everything but the kitchen sink is getting pulled in... no wait... that's there too :) ).

I want to globally exclude the slf4j-log4j12 jar from my built jar. So I've tried this:

configurations {
  runtime.exclude group: "org.slf4j", name: "slf4j-log4j12"
}

However, this seems to exclude all org.slf4j artifacts including slf4j-api. When running under debug mode I see lines such as:

org.slf4j#slf4j-api is excluded from com.pivotal.gfxd:gfxd-demo-mapreduce:1.0(runtime).
org.slf4j#slf4j-simple is excluded from com.pivotal.gfxd:gfxd-demo-mapreduce:1.0(runtime).
org.slf4j#slf4j-log4j12 is excluded from org.apache.hadoop:hadoop-common:2.2.0(runtime).

I do not want to have to look up the source of each slf4j-log4j12 transitive dependency and then have individual compile foo { exclude slf4j... } statements in my dependencies block.

Update:

I did also try this:

configurations {
  runtime.exclude name: "slf4j-log4j12"
}

Which ends up excluding everything from the build! As though I specified group: "*".

Update 2:

I'm using Gradle version 1.10 for this.

Your approach is correct. (Depending on the circumstances, you might want to use configurations.all { exclude ... }.) If these excludes really exclude more than a single dependency (I haven't ever noticed that when using them), please file a bug at http://forums.gradle.org, ideally with a reproducible example.

In addition to what @berguiga-mohamed-amine stated, I just found that a wildcard requires leaving the module argument the empty string:

compile ("com.github.jsonld-java:jsonld-java:$jsonldJavaVersion") {
    exclude group: 'org.apache.httpcomponents', module: ''
    exclude group: 'org.slf4j', module: ''
}

I was using spring boot 1.5.10 and tries to exclude logback, the given solution above did not work well, I use configurations instead

configurations.all {
    exclude group: "org.springframework.boot", module:"spring-boot-starter-logging"
}

in the example below I exclude

spring-boot-starter-tomcat

compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web") {
     //by both name and group
     exclude group: 'org.springframework.boot', module: 'spring-boot-starter-tomcat' 
}

For excluding one or more library globally add the following to your build.gradle

configurations.all {
   exclude group:"org.apache.geronimo.specs", module: "geronimo-servlet_2.5_spec"
   exclude group:"ch.qos.logback", module:"logback-core"
}

Now the exclude block has two properties group and module. For those of you coming from maven background, group is same as groupId and module is same as artifactId. Example: To exclude com.mchange:c3p0:0.9.2.1 following should be exclude block

exclude group:"com.mchange", module:"c3p0"