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…

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…

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 has a very powerful incremental build feature. This means Gradle will not execute a task unless it is necessary. We can help Gradle and configure our task so it is ready for an incremental build. Suppose we have a task that generates a file. T…

Migrating from Ant to Gradle is very easy with the importBuild method from AntBuilder. We only have to add this single line and reference our existing Ant build XML file and all Ant tasks can now be executed as Gradle tasks. We can automatically rena…

With the copy task of Gradle we can copy files that are parsed by Groovy's SimpleTemplateEngine. This means we can expand properties in the source file and add Groovy code that is going to be executed. We must use the expand() method in the copy task…

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…

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…