I joined the conversation late and did not fully read your original
intention. I simply thought you wanted to use the plugin plugin.
That plugin is meant to develop plugins, but it probably can be repurposed
to simply run integration tests. Your integration test gradle task would
need to depend on the integTestCluster task. I do not think you will be
able to use the clients though, so you will need to make sure that the test
cluster starts on a port you are expecting. Perhaps there is some
elasticsearch project that already has this behavior.