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 (18 chapters)
Gradle Effective Implementations Guide - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Getting started with the Java plugin


The Java plugin provides a lot of useful tasks and properties that we can use for building a Java application or library. If we follow the convention-over-configuration support of the plugin, we don't have to write a lot of code in our Gradle build file to use it. If we want to, we can still add extra configuration options to override the default conventions defined by the plugin.

Let's start with a new build file and use the Java plugin. We only have to apply the plugin for our build:

apply plugin: 'java' 

That's it! Just by adding this simple line, we now have a lot of tasks that we can use to work with in our Java project. To see the tasks that have been added by the plugin, we run the tasks command on the command line and look at the output:

$ gradle tasks
:tasks
------------------------------------------------------------
All tasks runnable from root project
------------------------------------------------------------
Build tasks
-----------
assemble...