Gradle and Spring-bootRun can not find my class

As far as I could understand from the question we are dealing with a multiple project scenario. In this case the multi project builds documentation tells us that it is necessary to have a settings.gradle in the folder that contains the two projects:

then it is possible to run both the projects without cd change directory into the specific folder , but directly from the multi-project root by command: gradle advanced:bootRun

EDIT according to 20200610 EDIT of the question acknowledging the specification: commits can only be made to the Advanced project.

we can still get a solution but in this scenario ( actually not a gradle multi-project)

• no need to have a settings.gradle at the parent directory level of Advanced; it satisfy the requirement of not being able to commit outside of Advanced

• it doesn't matter how it's built the Classic project, we don't care about it since we can't commit on it

• we can't use in Advanced/build.gradle the implementation project(':classic') as dependency since this works only in real gradle multi-project scenarios ; in here we must use a file dependency or another type of dependecy available for the user's development environment.

In this case it is possible to run the Advanced project by cd Advanced then , from the Advanced directory run th command: gradle bootRun

why it works ?

..In order to better understand how it works lets's inspect the SystemClassLoader's current paths by adding this lines of code in Advanced/src/main/java/com/example/springboot/Application.java

ClassLoader cl = ClassLoader.getSystemClassLoader();
URL[] urls = ((URLClassLoader)cl).getURLs();
for(URL url: urls){
    System.out.println(url.getFile());
}

the output is:

<multi-project-root>/Advanced/build/classes/java/main/
<multi-project-root>/Advanced/build/resources/main/
<multi-project-root>/Classic/build/libs/Classic-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
~/.gradle/caches/modules-2/files-2.1/org.springframework.boot/spring
... [suppressed many othe spring devtools and gradle related caches  ]

this allow both the Advanced and the Classic classes to find each others

source code of a proof of concempt

The POC source-code new branch has been updated accordingly

What you need is Gradle's composite build. See my POC project. The advanced project includes the classic project by this line

The advanced/App.java calls classic.App.main, And the classic.App class can load foo.Bar from the advanced project. No need to do a commit to classic project.

Execute "gradlew run" in the advanced folder

to see how it works.