Run gradle task within the test environment

I am currently trying to run some protractor tests within the gradle test environment. What I would like to do is:

• Start the test environment.
• Start selenium.
• Start protractor.
• End the test environment.

Has anyone got any experience doing something similar? I have tried a couple of ways but it seems that when I create a task of type Test and run it, because I am not specifying a Java/Groovy sourceset for the test (because I am not running Java/Groovy tests), the test task stops as soon as the compile task completes.

There are a few blog posts out there explaining how to run protractor with gradle but they do so without a fully running springboot application.

Any help with this would be much appreciated.