Your task declaration is incorrectly combining the Copy task type and project.copy method, resulting in a task that has nothing to copy and thus never runs. Besides, Copy isn't the right choice for renaming a directory. There is no Gradle API for renaming, but a bit of Groovy code (leveraging Java's File API) will do. Assuming Project1 is the project directory:
task renABCToXYZ { doLast { file("ABC").renameTo(file("XYZ")) } } Looking at the bigger picture, it's probably better to add the renaming logic (i.e. the doLast task action) to the task that produces ABC.