Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementations Guide - Second Edition

By : Hubert Klein Ikkink
Book Image

Gradle Effective Implementations Guide - Second Edition

By: Hubert Klein Ikkink

Overview of this book

Gradle is a project automation tool that has a wide range of applications. The basic aim of Gradle is to automate a wide variety of tasks performed by software developers, including compiling computer source code to binary code, packaging binary codes, running tests, deploying applications to production systems, and creating documentation. The book will start with the fundamentals of Gradle and introduce you to the tools that will be used in further chapters. You will learn to create and work with Gradle scripts and then see how to use Gradle to build your Java Projects. While building Java application, you will find out about other important topics such as dependency management, publishing artifacts, and integrating the application with other JVM languages such as Scala and Groovy. By the end of this book, you will be able to use Gradle in your daily development. Writing tasks, applying plugins, and creating build logic will be your second nature.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Writing a build script


In the first chapter, we have already written our first build script. Let's create a similar build script with a simple task. Gradle will look for a file with the name build.gradle in the current directory. The build.gradle file contains the tasks that make up our project. In this example, we define a simple task that prints out a simple message to the console:

// Assign value to description property. 
project.description = 'Simple project' 
 
// DSL to create a new task using 
// Groovy << operator. 
task simple << { 
    println 'Running simple task for project ' + 
      project.description 
} 

If we run the build, we see the following output in the console:

:simple
Running simple task for project Simple project
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0.57 secs

A couple of interesting things happen with this small build script. Gradle reads the script file and creates a Project object. The build script configures the Project object, and finally, the set of tasks...