Gradle: how to clone a git repo in a task?

Question

Suppose I have a gradle build script and want to write a task to clone a remote git repository. How do I do that?

Answer 1

The aforementioned Gradle-git plugin seems to have moved on from providing straightforward "clone this repo to that directory" functionality, so I wrote a simple task that does just this:

https://github.com/palominolabs/gradle-git-clone-task