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)

Accessing tasks as project properties


Each task that we add is also available as a project property, and we can reference this property like we can reference any other property in our build script. We can, for example, invoke methods or get and set the property values of our task through the property reference. This means that we are very flexible in how we create our tasks and add behavior to the tasks. In the following script, we use the project property reference to a task to change the description property:

// Create a simple task. 
task simple << { task -> 
    println "Running ${task.name}" 
} 
 
// The simple task is available as 
// project property. 
simple.description = 'Print task name' 
 
// We can invoke methods from the 
// Task object. 
simple.doLast { 
    println "Done" 
} 
 
// We can also reference the task 
// via the project property 
// explicitly. 
project.simple.doFirst { 
    println "Start" 
} 

When we run our task from the command line, we get the following...