Book Image

Gradle Essentials

By : Abhinandan Maheshwari
Book Image

Gradle Essentials

By: Abhinandan Maheshwari

Overview of this book

Gradle is an advanced and modern build automation tool. It inherits the best elements of the past generation of build tools, but it also differs and innovates to bring terseness, elegance, simplicity, and the flexibility to build. Right from installing Gradle and writing your first build file to creating a fully-fledged multi-module project build, this book will guide you through its topics in a step-by-step fashion. You will get your hands dirty with a simple Java project built with Gradle and go on to build web applications that are run with Jetty or Tomcat. We take a unique approach towards explaining the DSL using the Gradle API, which makes the DSL more accessible and intuitive. All in all, this book is a concise guide to help you decipher the Gradle build files, covering the essential topics that are most useful in real-world projects. With every chapter, you will learn a new topic and be able to readily implement your build files.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Gradle Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


We started off this chapter by building a very simple Java project. We saw how the intelligent conventions of the java plugin helped us keep the build file concise. Then, we added unit tests to this project and included the JUnit library from the Maven central repository. We made the tests fail and checked the reports to see the explanation. Then, we saw how the application's distribution can be created using the application plugin. Finally, we saw the idea and eclipse plugins that help us generate the IDE-specific files for our project.

Overall, we realized how powerful the plugin system in Gradle is. Gradle, out-of-the-box, ships with many interesting plugins, but we are not forced to use any of them. We will build a web application in the next chapter and also learn how configurations and dependency management works..