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

Creating a custom plugin


One of the great features of Gradle is the support for plugins. A plugin can contain tasks, configurations, properties, methods, concepts, and more to add extra functionality to our projects. For example, if we apply the Java plugin to our project, we can immediately invoke the compile, test, and build tasks. Also, we have new dependency configurations we can use and extra properties we can configure. The Java plugin itself applies the java-base plugin. The java-base plugin doesn't introduce tasks, but the concept of source sets. This is a good pattern for creating our own plugins, where a base plugin introduces new concepts and another plugin derives from the base plugin and adds explicit build logic-like tasks.

So a plugin is a good way to distribute build logic that we want to share between projects. We can write our own plugin, give it an explicit version, and publish it to, for example, a repository. Other projects can then re-use the functionality by simply...