How do I generate build-info.properties in the IntelliJ "out" directory on debug/run for a Spring Boot project?

Enable Delegate IDE build/run actions to Gradle option in Settings (Preferences) | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Gradle | Runner tab.

In latest IDE versions set Gradle for the Settings (Preferences on macOS) | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Gradle | Build and run using option.

I have exactly the same need, and I don't want to use "delegate IDE build/run action to Gradle" for different (good) reasons.

In my case I don't need that file /META-INF/build-info.properties to be up-to-date in IDEA during develop phase, I just need this file to be available in the "run" classpath (under /out/...), else Spring won't be able to create and inject the BuildProperties bean when launching my app from IDEA run/debug tool.

So here is a simple solution if your are also in my case:

1. create a dummy "dev" (or "snapshot") version of the build-info.properties in the main resources directory ( src/main/resources/META-INF/build-info.properties )

   #DO NOT EDIT (will be overriden by Spring boot plugin ) build.time=2019-05-07T11:32:31.581Z build.artifact=myapp build.group=org.mycompany build.name=myapp build.version=dev

This dev version will be automatically copied into IDEA /out/production/resources directory when building project from IDEA

2. Create a task dependency between bootBuildInfo task and processResources tasks, to make sure that Spring boot plugin will override the "dev" version with up-to-date version when building the app jar:

   bootBuildInfo.mustRunAfter processResources

This way, SpringBoot gradle plugin will override the file copied from sources by processResources task, with its auto-generated up-to-date file.

EDIT 2020-10

As Dmitry warned in comment below, this solution will break Gradle incremental build, as both processResources and bootBuildInfo tasks share the same output file build-info.properties. To avoid that, we can add exclusion in the processResources to filter out this file, when we detect that tasks graph contains bootBuildInfo tasks

project.gradle.taskGraph.whenReady {
    if (it.allTasks.any {it.name == "bootBuildInfo"}) {
        processResources {
            exclude("META-INF/build-info.properties")
        }
    }
}