Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementation Guide

Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementation Guide

Overview of this book

Gradle is the next generation in build automation. It uses convention-over-configuration to provide good defaults, but is also flexible enough to be usable in every situation you encounter in daily development. Build logic is described with a powerful DSL and empowers developers to create reusable and maintainable build logic."Gradle Effective Implementation Guide" is a great introduction and reference for using Gradle. The Gradle build language is explained with hands on code and practical applications. You learn how to apply Gradle in your Java, Scala or Groovy projects, integrate with your favorite IDE and how to integrate with well-known continuous integration servers.Start with the foundations and work your way through hands on examples to build your knowledge of Gradle to skyscraper heights. You will quickly learn the basics of Gradle, how to write tasks, work with files and how to use write build scripts using the Groovy DSL. Then as you develop you will be shown how to use Gradle for Java projects. Compile, package, test and deploy your applications with ease. When you've mastered the simple, move on to the sublime and integrate your code with continuous integration servers and IDEs. By the end of the "Gradle Effective Implementation Guide" you will be able to use Gradle in your daily development. Writing tasks, applying plugins and creating build logic will be second nature.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Gradle Effective Implementation Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Defining tasks


A project has one or more tasks to execute some actions, so a task is made up of actions. These actions are executed when the task is executed. Gradle supports several ways to add actions to our tasks.

We can use the doFirst and doLast methods to add actions to our task, and we can use the left shift operator (<<) as a synonym for the doLast method. With the doLast method or the left shift operator (<<) we add actions at the end of the list of actions for the task. With the doFirst method we can add actions to the beginning of the list of actions. The following script shows how we can use the several methods:

task first {
    doFirst {
        println 'Running first'
    }
}

task second {
    doLast { Task task ->
        println "Running ${task.name}"
    }
}

task third << { taskObject ->
    println 'Running ' + taskObject.name
}

When we run the script, we get the following output:

$ gradle first second third
:first
Running first
:second
Running...