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
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All tasks runnable from root project
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Build tasks
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assemble...