We can run a Gradle build without any of the task actions being executed. This is a so-called dry run of our build. We can use the dry run of a build to see if the task dependencies we have defined or are defined in a plugin are defined properly. Bec…

If we use Gradle in a multi-module project we can define project dependencies between modules. Gradle uses the information from the project dependencies to determine which tasks need to be run. For example if module B depends on module A and we want…

Gradle support the definition of so called live collections. These collections are mostly created based on criteria like with a filter() or matching() method. The collection content can change if the content of the source collection changes. For exam…

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…

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…

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 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…

To get the current Gradle version we can use the gradleVersion property of the Gradle object. This returns a string value we can use for displaying the values. If we want to compare Gradle versions we can use the GradleVersion object. With this class…

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…

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…