To see which tasks are available for our build we can run Gradle with the command-line option -t or --tasks. Gradle outputs the available tasks from our build script. By default only the tasks which are dependencies on other tasks are shown. To see a…

In Gradle we can assign a task to a group. Gradle uses the group for example in the output of $ gradle -t to output all the tasks of the same group together. We only have to set the group property with a value and our task belongs to a group. In the…

Gradle adds the task rule clean<Taskname> to our projects when we apply the base plugin. This task is able to remove any output files or directories we have defined for our task. For example we can assign an output file or directory to our task with…

If we run a Gradle build and one of the tasks fails, the whole build stops immediately. So we have fast feedback of our build status. If we don't want to this and want Gradle to execute all tasks, even though some might have failed, we use the comman…

Gradle Goodness: Task Output Annotations Create Directory Automatically One of the great features of Gradle is incremental build support. With incremental build support a task is only executed if it is really necessary. For example if a task generate…

Gradle Goodness: Init Script for Adding Extra Plugins to Existing Projects Gradle is very flexible. One of the ways to alter the build configuration is with initialization or init scripts. These are like other Gradle scripts but are executed before t…

Gradle Goodness: Copy Files with Filtering Gradle's copy task is very powerful and includes filtering capabilities. This means we can change the contents of the files that are copied before they reach their new destination. We use the filter() method…

Gradle uses the name build.gradle as the default name for a build file. If we write our build code in a file build.gradle then we don't have to specify the build filename when we run tasks. We can create build files with a different name other than b…

In Gradle we can create dependencies between tasks. But we can also exclude certain tasks from those dependencies. We use the command-line option -x or --exclude-task and specify the name of task we don't want to execute. Any dependencies of this tas…

In Gradle we can group related tasks using the group property of a task. We provide the name of our group and if we look at the output of the tasks task we can see our tasks grouped in section with the given name. In the next sample we create a new t…