Gradle User Manual: Version 6.3

Gradle is an open-source build automation tool that is designed to be flexible enough to build almost any type of software. The following is a high-level overview of some of its most important features:

Gradle is a flexible and powerful build tool that can easily feel intimidating when you first start. However, understanding the following core principles will make Gradle much more approachable and you will become adept with the tool before you know it.

In order to use Gradle effectively, you need to know what it is and understand some of its fundamental concepts. So before you start using Gradle in earnest, we highly recommend you read What is Gradle?.

Even if you’re experienced with using Gradle, we suggest you read the section 5 things you need to know about Gradle as it clears up some common misconceptions.

If all you want to do is run an existing Gradle build, then you don’t need to install Gradle if the build has a Gradle Wrapper, identifiable via the gradlew and/or gradlew.bat files in the root of the build. You just need to make sure your system satisfies Gradle’s prerequisites.

Android Studio comes with a working installation of Gradle, so you don’t need to install Gradle separately in that case.

In order to create a new build or add a Wrapper to an existing build, you will need to install Gradle according to these instructions. Note that there may be other ways to install Gradle in addition to those described on that page, since it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all the package managers out there.

Actively using Gradle is a great way to learn about it, so once you’ve installed Gradle, try one of the introductory hands-on tutorials:

There are also many other tutorials and guides available, which you can filter by category — for example Fundamentals.

Some folks are hard-core command-line users, while others prefer to never leave the comfort of their IDE. Many people happily use both and Gradle endeavors not to discriminate. Gradle is supported by several major IDEs and everything that can be done from the command line is available to IDEs via the Tooling API.

Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA users should consider using Kotlin DSL build scripts for the superior IDE support when editing them.

If you follow any of the tutorials linked above, you will execute a Gradle build. But what do you do if you’re given a Gradle build without any instructions?

Here are some useful steps to follow:

Gradle builds often follow standard conventions on project structure and tasks, so if you’re familiar with other builds of the same type — such as Java, Android or native builds — then the file and directory structure of the build should be familiar, as well as many of the tasks and project properties.

For more specialized builds or those with significant customizations, you should ideally have access to documentation on how to run the build and what build properties you can configure.

Learning to create and maintain Gradle builds is a process, and one that takes a little time. We recommend that you start with the appropriate core plugins and their conventions for your project, and then gradually incorporate customizations as you learn more about the tool.

Here are some useful first steps on your journey to mastering Gradle:

The user manual contains a lot of other useful information and you can find more tutorials on various Gradle features among the Gradle Guides.

Gradle’s flexibility means that it readily works with other tools, such as those listed on our Gradle & Third-party Tools page.

There are two main modes of integration:

Tools that have existing Java-based APIs are generally straightforward to integrate. You can find many such integrations on Gradle’s plugin portal.

Gradle runs on all major operating systems and requires only a Java Development Kit version 8 or higher to run. To check, run java -version. You should see something like this:

Gradle ships with its own Groovy library, therefore Groovy does not need to be installed. Any existing Groovy installation is ignored by Gradle.

Gradle uses whatever JDK it finds in your path. Alternatively, you can set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the installation directory of the desired JDK.

See the full compatibility notes for Java, Groovy, Kotlin and Android.

SDKMAN! is a tool for managing parallel versions of multiple Software Development Kits on most Unix-like systems (macOS, Linux, Cygwin, Solaris and FreeBSD). We deploy and maintain the versions available from SDKMAN!.

Homebrew is "the missing package manager for macOS".

Other package managers are available, but the version of Gradle distributed by them is not controlled by Gradle, Inc. Linux package managers may distribute a modified version of Gradle that is incompatible or incomplete when compared to the official version (available from SDKMAN! or below).

↓ Proceed to next steps

Open a console (or a Windows command prompt) and run gradle -v to run gradle and display the version, e.g.:

If you run into any trouble, see the section on troubleshooting installation.

You can verify the integrity of the Gradle distribution by downloading the SHA-256 file (available from the releases page) and following these verification instructions.

Now that you have Gradle installed, use these resources for getting started:

If you followed the installation instructions, and aren’t able to execute your Gradle build, here are some tips that may help.

If you installed Gradle outside of just invoking the Gradle Wrapper, you can check your Gradle installation by running gradle --version in a terminal.

You should see something like this:

If not, here are some things you might see instead.

Common dependency resolution issues such as resolving version conflicts are covered in Troubleshooting Dependency Resolution.

You can see a dependency tree and see which resolved dependency versions differed from what was requested by clicking the Dependencies view and using the search functionality, specifying the resolution reason.

The actual build scan with filtering criteria is available for exploration.

For build performance issues (including “slow sync time”), see the guide to Improving the Performance of Gradle Builds.

Android developers should watch a presentation by the Android SDK Tools team about Speeding Up Your Android Gradle Builds. Many tips are also covered in the Android Studio user guide on optimizing build speed.

Many infrequent errors within IDEs can be solved by "refreshing" Gradle. See also more documentation on working with Gradle in IntelliJ IDEA and in Eclipse.

If you didn’t find a fix for your issue here, please reach out to the Gradle community on the help forum or search relevant developer resources using help.gradle.org.

If you believe you’ve found a bug in Gradle, please file an issue on GitHub.

A Java version between 8 and 14 is required to execute Gradle. Java 15 and later versions are not yet supported.

Java 6 and 7 can still be used for compilation and forked test execution.

Any supported version of Java can be used for compile or test.

Gradle is tested with Kotlin 1.3.21 through 1.3.70.

Gradle is tested with Groovy 1.5.8 through 2.5.10.

Gradle is tested with Android Gradle Plugin 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6.

In addition, Gradle has added several significant new and improved features that you should consider using in your builds:

Other notable changes to be aware of that may break your build include:

If you are not already on version 4.10, skip down to the section that applies to your current Gradle version and work your way up until you reach here. Then, apply these changes when moving from Gradle 4.10 to 5.0.

If you are not already on version 4.9, skip down to the section that applies to your current Gradle version and work your way up until you reach here. Then, apply these changes when upgrading to Gradle 4.10.

The primary differences between Gradle and Maven are flexibility, performance, user experience, and dependency management. A visual overview of these aspects is available in the Maven vs Gradle feature comparison.

Since Gradle 3.0, Gradle has invested heavily in making Gradle builds much faster, with features such as build caching, compile avoidance, and an improved incremental Java compiler. Gradle is now 2-10x faster than Maven for the vast majority of projects, even without using a build cache. In-depth performance comparison and business cases for switching from Maven to Gradle can be found here.

Gradle and Maven have fundamentally different views on how to build a project. Gradle provides a flexible and extensible build model that delegates the actual work to a graph of task dependencies. Maven uses a model of fixed, linear phases to which you can attach goals (the things that do the work). This may make migrating between the two seem intimidating, but migrations can be surprisingly easy because Gradle follows many of the same conventions as Maven — such as the standard project structure — and its dependency management works in a similar way.

Here we lay out a series of steps for you to follow that will help facilitate the migration of any Maven build to Gradle:

The rest of this chapter looks in more detail at specific aspects of migrating a build from Maven to Gradle.

Maven builds are based around the concept of build lifecycles that consist of a set of fixed phases. This can prove an impediment for users migrating to Gradle because its build lifecycle is something different, although it’s important to understand how Gradle builds fit into the structure of initialization, configuration, and execution phases. Fortunately, Gradle has a feature that can mimic Maven’s phases: lifecycle tasks.

These allow you to define your own "lifecycles" by creating no-action tasks that simply depend on the tasks you’re interested in. And to make the transition to Gradle easier for Maven users, the Base Plugin — applied by all the JVM language plugins like the Java Library Plugin — provides a set of lifecycle tasks that correspond to the main Maven phases.

Here is a list of some of the main Maven phases and the Gradle tasks that they map to:

Gradle’s init task is typically used to create a new skeleton project, but you can also use it to convert an existing Maven build to Gradle automatically. Once Gradle is installed on your system, all you have to do is run the command

from the root project directory and let Gradle do its thing. That basically consists of parsing the existing POMs and generating the corresponding Gradle build scripts. Gradle will also create a settings script if you’re migrating a multi-project build.

You’ll find that the new Gradle build includes the following:

See the Build Init Plugin chapter for a complete list of the automatic conversion features.

One thing to bear in mind is that assemblies are not automatically converted. They aren’t necessarily problematic to convert, but you will need to do some manual work. Options include:

If your Maven build does not have many plugins or much in the way of customisation, you can simply run

once the migration has completed. This will run the tests and produce the required artifacts without any extra intervention on your part.

Gradle’s dependency management system is more flexible than Maven’s, but it still supports the same concepts of repositories, declared dependencies, scopes (dependency configurations in Gradle), and transitive dependencies. In fact, Gradle works perfectly with Maven-compatible repositories, which makes it easy to migrate your dependencies.

Over the following sections, we will show you how to migrate the most common elements of a Maven build’s dependency management information.

Maven allows you to share dependency constraints by defining dependencies inside a <dependencyManagement> section of a POM file that has a packaging type of pom. This special type of POM (a BOM) can then be imported into other POMs so that you have consistent library versions across your projects.

Gradle can use such BOMs for the same purpose, using a special dependency syntax based on platform() and enforcedPlatform() methods. You simply declare the dependency in the normal way, but wrap the dependency identifier in the appropriate method, as shown in this example that "imports" the Spring Boot Dependencies BOM:

You can learn more about this feature and the difference between platform() and enforcedPlatform() in the section on importing version recommendations from a Maven BOM.

Maven’s multi-module builds map nicely to Gradle’s multi-project builds. Try the corresponding tutorial to see how a basic multi-project Gradle build is set up.

To migrate a multi-module Maven build, simply follow these steps:

Maven allows you parameterize builds using properties of various sorts. Some are read-only properties of the project model, others are user-defined in the POM. It even allows you to treat system properties as project properties.

Gradle has a similar system of project properties, although it differentiates between those and system properties. You can, for example, define properties in:

Those aren’t the only options, so if you are interested in finding out more about how and where you can define properties, check out the Build Environment chapter.

One important piece of behavior you need to be aware of is what happens when the same property is defined in both the build script and one of the external properties files: the build script value takes precedence. Always. Fortunately, you can mimic the concept of profiles to provide overridable default values.

Which brings us on to Maven profiles. These are a way to enable and disable different configurations based on environment, target platform, or any other similar factor. Logically, they are nothing more than limited ‘if' statements. And since Gradle has much more powerful ways to declare conditions, it does not need to have formal support for profiles (except in the POMs of dependencies). You can easily get the same behavior by combining conditions with secondary build scripts, as you’ll see.

Let’s say you have different deployment settings depending on the environment: local development (the default), a test environment, and production. To add profile-like behavior, you first create build scripts for each environment in the project root: profile-default.gradle, profile-test.gradle, and profile-prod.gradle. You can then conditionally apply one of those profile scripts based on a project property of your own choice.

The following example demonstrates the basic technique using a project property called buildProfile and profile scripts that simply initialize an extra project property called message:

With this setup in place, you can activate one of the profiles by passing a value for the project property you’re using — buildProfile in this case:

You’re not limited to checking project properties. You could also check environment variables, the JDK version, the OS the build is running on, or anything else you can imagine.

One thing to bear in mind is that high level condition statements make builds harder to understand and maintain, similar to the way they complicate object-oriented code. The same applies to profiles. Gradle offers you many better ways to avoid the extensive use of profiles that Maven often requires, for example by configuring multiple tasks that are variants of one another. See the publishPubNamePublicationToRepoNameRepository tasks created by the Maven Publish Plugin.

For a lengthier discussion on working with Maven profiles in Gradle, look no further than this blog post.

Maven has a phase called process-resources that has the goal resources:resources bound to it by default. This gives the build author an opportunity to perform variable substitution on various files, such as web resources, packaged properties files, etc.

The Java plugin for Gradle provides a processResources task to do the same thing. This is a Copy task that copies files from the configured resources directory — src/main/resources by default — to an output directory. And as with any Copy task, you can configure it to perform file filtering, renaming, and content filtering.

As an example, here’s a configuration that treats the source files as Groovy SimpleTemplateEngine templates, providing version and buildNumber properties to those templates:

See the API docs for CopySpec to see all the options available to you.

Many Maven builds incorporate integration tests of some sort, which Maven supports through an extra set of phases: pre-integration-test, integration-test, post-integration-test, and verify. It also uses the Failsafe plugin in place of Surefire so that failed integration tests don’t automatically fail the build (because you may need to clean up resources, such as a running application server).

This behavior is easy to replicate in Gradle with source sets, as explained in our chapter on Testing in Java & JVM projects. You can then configure a clean-up task, such as one that shuts down a test server for example, to always run after the integration tests regardless of whether they succeed or fail using Task.finalizedBy().

If you really don’t want your integration tests to fail the build, then you can use the Test.ignoreFailures setting described in the Test execution section of the Java testing chapter.

Source sets also give you a lot of flexibility on where you place the source files for your integration tests. You can easily keep them in the same directory as the unit tests or, more preferably, in a separate source directory like src/integTest/java. To support other types of tests, you just add more source sets and Test tasks!

Maven and Gradle share a common approach of extending the build through plugins. Although the plugin systems are very different beneath the surface, they share many feature-based plugins, such as:

Why does this matter? Because many plugins rely on standard Java conventions, so migration is just a matter of replicating the configuration of the Maven plugin in Gradle. As an example, here’s a simple Maven Checkstyle plugin configuration:

Everything outside of the configuration block can safely be ignored when migrating to Gradle. In this case, the corresponding Gradle configuration looks like the following:

The Checkstyle tasks are automatically added as dependencies of the check task, which also includes test. If you want to ensure that Checkstyle runs before the tests, then just specify an ordering with the mustRunAfter() method:

As you can see, the Gradle configuration is often much shorter than the Maven equivalent. You also have a much more flexible execution model since you are no longer constrained by Maven’s fixed phases.

While migrating a project from Maven, don’t forget about source sets. These often provide a more elegant solution for handling integration tests or generated sources than Maven can provide, so you should factor them into your migration plans.

It’s worth remembering that Gradle builds are typically easier to extend and customize than Maven ones. In this context, that means you may not need a Gradle plugin to replace a Maven one. For example, the Maven Enforcer plugin allows you to control dependency versions and environmental factors, but these things can easily be configured in a normal Gradle build script.

You may come across Maven plugins that have no counterpart in Gradle, particularly if you or someone in your organisation has written a custom plugin. Such cases rely on you understanding how Gradle (and potentially Maven) works, because you will usually have to write your own plugin.

For the purposes of migration, there are two key types of Maven plugins:

Why is this important? Because if you use one of the latter, you can trivially reimplement it as a custom Gradle task type. Simply define task inputs and outputs that correspond to the mojo parameters and convert the execution logic into a task action.

If a plugin depends on the Maven project, then you will have to rewrite it. Don’t start by considering how the Maven plugin works, but look at what problem it is trying to solve. Then try to work out how to solve that problem in Gradle. You’ll probably find that the two build models are different enough that "transcribing" Maven plugin code into a Gradle plugin just won’t be effective. On the plus side, the plugin is likely to be much easier to write than the original Maven one because Gradle has a much richer build model and API.

If you do need to implement custom logic, either via build scripts or plugins, check out the Guides related to plugin development. Also be sure to familiarize yourself with Gradle’s Groovy DSL Reference, which provides comprehensive documentation on the API that you’ll be working with. It details the standard configuration blocks (and the objects that back them), the core types in the system (Project, Task, etc.), and the standard set of task types. The main entry point is the Project interface as that’s the top-level object that backs the build scripts.

This chapter has covered the major topics that are specific to migrating Maven builds to Gradle. All that remain are a few other areas that may be useful during or after a migration:

As a final note, this guide has only touched on a few of Gradle’s features and we encourage you to learn about the rest from the other chapters of the user manual and from our tutorial-style Gradle Guides.

When you undertake to migrate a build from Ant to Gradle, you should keep in mind the nature of both what you already have and where you would like to end up. Do you want a Gradle build that mirrors the structure of the existing Ant build? Or do you want to move to something that is more idiomatic to Gradle? What are the main benefits you are looking for?

To understand the implications, consider the two extreme endpoints that you could aim for:

You ideally want to end up somewhere close to the second option in the long term, but you don’t have to get there in one fell swoop.

What follows is a series of steps to help you decide the approach you want to take and how to go about it:

The rest of the chapter covers some common scenarios you will likely deal with during the migration, such as dependency management and working with Ant tasks.

The first step of many migrations will involve importing an Ant build using ant.importBuild(). If you do that, how do you then move towards a standard Gradle build without replacing everything at once?

The important thing to remember is that the Ant targets become real Gradle tasks, meaning you can do things like modify their task dependencies, attach extra task actions, and so on. This allows you to substitute native Gradle tasks for the equivalent Ant ones, maintaining any links to other existing tasks.

As an example, imagine that you have a Java library project that you want to migrate from Ant to Gradle. The Gradle build script has the line that imports the Ant build and now want to use the standard Gradle mechanism for compiling the Java source files. However, you want to keep using the existing package task that creates the library’s JAR file.

In diagrammatic form, the scenario looks like the following, where each box represents a target/task:

The idea is to substitute the standard Gradle compileJava task for the Ant build task. There are several steps involved in this substitution:

Applying the plugin is as simple as inserting a plugins {} block at the beginning of the Gradle build script, i.e. before ant.importBuild(). Here’s how to apply the Java Library Plugin:

To rename the build task, use the variant of AntBuilder.importBuild() that accepts a transformer, like this:

Configuring a different path for the sources is described in the Building Java & JVM projects chapter, while you can change the output directory for the compiled classes in a similar way.

Let’s say the original Ant build stores these paths in Ant properties, src.dir for the Java source files and classes.dir for the output. Here’s how you would configure Gradle to use those paths:

You should eventually aim to switch the standard directory structure for your type of project if possible and then you’ll be able to remove this customization.

The last step is also straightforward and involves using the Task.dependsOn property and Task.dependsOn() method to detach and link tasks. The property is appropriate for replacing dependencies, while the method is the preferred way to add to the existing dependencies.

Here is the required task dependency configuration required by the example scenario, which should come after the Ant build import:

That’s it! These four steps will successfully replace the old Ant compilation with the Gradle implementation. Even this small migration will be a big help because you’ll be able to take advantage of Gradle’s incremental Java compilation for faster builds.

One important question you will have to ask yourself is how many tasks to migrate in each stage. The larger the chunks you can migrate in one go the better, but this must be offset against how many custom steps within the Ant build will be affected by the changes.

For example, if the Ant build follows a fairly standard approach for compilation, static resources, packaging and unit tests, then it is probably worth migrating all those together. But if the build performs some extra processing on the compiled classes, or does something unique when processing the static resources, it is probably worth splitting those tasks into separate stages.

Ant builds typically take one of two approaches to dealing with binary dependencies (such as libraries):

They each require a different technique for the migration to Gradle, but you will find the process straightforward in either case. We look at the details of each scenario in the following sections.

Projects that use Ivy to manage dependencies often also use it for publishing JARs and other artifacts to repositories. If you’re migrating such a build, then you’ll be glad to know that Gradle has built-in support for publishing artifacts to Ivy-compatible repositories.

Before you attempt to migrate this particular aspect of your build, read the Publishing chapter to learn about Gradle’s publishing model. That chapter’s examples are based on Maven repositories, but the same model is used for Ivy repositories as well.

The basic migration process looks like this:

Once that’s all done, you’ll be able to generate an Ivy module descriptor for each publication and publish them to one or more repositories.

Let’s say you have defined a publication named "myLibrary" and a repository named "myRepo". Ivy’s Ant tasks would then map to the Gradle tasks like this:

There is also a convenient publish task that publishes all publications to all repositories. If you’d prefer to limit which publications go to which repositories, check out the relevant section of the Publishing chapter.

One of the advantages of Ant is that it’s fairly easy to create a custom task and incorporate it into a build. If you have such tasks, then there are two main options for migrating them to a Gradle build:

The first option is usually quick and easy, but not always. And if you want to integrate the task into incremental build, you must use the incremental build runtime API. You also often have to work with Ant paths and filesets, which are clunky.

The second option is preferable in the long term, if you have the time. Gradle task types tend to be simpler than Ant tasks because they don’t have to work with an XML-based interface. You also gain access to Gradle’s rich APIs. Lastly, this approach can make use of the type-safe incremental build API based on typed properties.

Ant has many tasks for working with files, most of which have Gradle equivalents. As with other areas of Ant to Gradle migration, you can use those Ant tasks from within your Gradle build. However, we strongly recommend migrating to native Gradle constructs where possible so that the build benefits from:

That said, it can be convenient to use those Ant tasks that have no direct equivalents, such as <checksum> and <chown>. Even then, in the long run it may be better to convert these to native Gradle task types that make use of standard Java APIs or third-party libraries to achieve the same thing.

Here are the most common file-related elements used by Ant builds, along with the Gradle equivalents:

You can see several examples of Gradle’s file API and learn more about it in the Working with Files chapter.

Ant makes use of a properties map to store values that can be reused throughout the build. The big downsides to this approach are that property values are all strings and the properties themselves behave like global variables.

Gradle does use something similar in the form of project properties, which are a reasonable way to parameterize a build. These can be set from the command line, in a gradle.properties file, or even via specially named system properties and environment variables.

If you have existing Ant properties files, you can copy their contents into the project’s gradle.properties file. Just be aware of two important points:

Another important factor to understand is that a Gradle build script works with an object-oriented API and it’s often best to use the properties of tasks, source sets and other objects where possible. For example, this build script fragment creates tasks for packaging Javadoc documentation as a JAR and unpacking it, linking tasks via their properties:

As you can see from the example with tmpDistDir, there is often still a need to define paths and the like through properties, which is why Gradle also provides extra properties that can be attached to the project, tasks and some other types of objects.

Multi-project builds are a particular challenge to migrate because there is no standard approach in Ant for either structuring them or handling inter-project dependencies. Most of them likely use the <ant> task in some way, but that’s about all that one can say.

Fortunately, Gradle’s multi-project support can handle fairly diverse project structures and it provides much more robust and helpful support than Ant for constructing and maintaining multi-project builds. The ant.importBuild() method also handles <ant> and <antcall> tasks transparently, which allows for a phased migration.

We will suggest one process for migration here and hope that it either works for your case or at least gives you some ideas. It breaks down like this:

At the end of the process you should have a Gradle build that you are confident works as it should, with much less build logic than before.

This chapter has covered the major topics that are specific to migrating Ant builds to Gradle. All that remain are a few other areas that may be useful during or after a migration:

As a final note, this guide has only touched on a few of Gradle’s features and we encourage you to learn about the rest from the other chapters of the user manual and from our tutorial-style Gradle Guides.

Gradle provides several options that make it easy to configure the Java process that will be used to execute your build. While it’s possible to configure these in your local environment via GRADLE_OPTS or JAVA_OPTS, it is useful to store certain settings like JVM memory configuration and Java home location in version control so that an entire team can work with a consistent environment.

Setting up a consistent environment for your build is as simple as placing these settings into a gradle.properties file. The configuration is a combination of all your gradle.properties files, but if an option is configured in multiple locations, the first one wins:

The following properties can be used to configure the Gradle build environment:

The following example demonstrates usage of various properties.

Using the -D command-line option, you can pass a system property to the JVM which runs Gradle. The -D option of the gradle command has the same effect as the -D option of the java command.

You can also set system properties in gradle.properties files with the prefix systemProp.

The following system properties are available. Note that command-line options take precedence over system properties.

In a multi project build, “systemProp.” properties set in any project except the root will be ignored. That is, only the root project’s gradle.properties file will be checked for properties that begin with the “systemProp.” prefix.

The following environment variables are available for the gradle command. Note that command-line options and system properties take precedence over environment variables.

You can add properties directly to your Project object via the -P command line option.

Gradle can also set project properties when it sees specially-named system properties or environment variables. If the environment variable name looks like ORG_GRADLE_PROJECT_prop=somevalue, then Gradle will set a prop property on your project object, with the value of somevalue. Gradle also supports this for system properties, but with a different naming pattern, which looks like org.gradle.project.prop. Both of the following will set the foo property on your Project object to "bar".

This feature is very useful when you don’t have admin rights to a continuous integration server and you need to set property values that should not be easily visible. Since you cannot use the -P option in that scenario, nor change the system-level configuration files, the correct strategy is to change the configuration of your continuous integration build job, adding an environment variable setting that matches an expected pattern. This won’t be visible to normal users on the system.

You can access a project property in your build script simply by using its name as you would use a variable.

You can adjust JVM options for Gradle in the following ways:

The org.gradle.jvmargs Gradle property controls the VM running the build. It defaults to -Xmx512m "-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=256m"

The JAVA_OPTS environment variable controls the command line client, which is only used to display console output. It defaults to -Xmx64m

Certain tasks, like the test task, also fork additional JVM processes. You can configure these through the tasks themselves. They all use -Xmx512m by default.

See other examples in the Test API documentation and test execution in the Java plugin reference.

Build scans will tell you information about the JVM that executed the build when you use the --scan option.

It’s possible to change the behavior of a task based on project properties specified at invocation time.

Suppose you’d like to ensure release builds are only triggered by CI. A simple way to handle this is through an isCI project property.

Configuring an HTTP or HTTPS proxy (for downloading dependencies, for example) is done via standard JVM system properties. These properties can be set directly in the build script; for example, setting the HTTP proxy host would be done with System.setProperty('http.proxyHost', 'www.somehost.org'). Alternatively, the properties can be specified in gradle.properties.

There are separate settings for HTTPS.

You may need to set other properties to access other networks. Here are 2 references that may be helpful:

The Daemon is a long-lived process, so not only are we able to avoid the cost of JVM startup for every build, but we are able to cache information about project structure, files, tasks, and more in memory.

The reasoning is simple: improve build speed by reusing computations from previous builds. However, the benefits are dramatic: we typically measure build times reduced by 15-75% on subsequent builds. We recommend profiling your build by using --profile to get a sense of how much impact the Gradle Daemon can have for you.

The Gradle Daemon is enabled by default starting with Gradle 3.0, so you don’t have to do anything to benefit from it.

To get a list of running Gradle Daemons and their statuses use the --status command.

Sample output:

Currently, a given Gradle version can only connect to daemons of the same version. This means the status output will only show Daemons for the version of Gradle being invoked and not for any other versions. Future versions of Gradle will lift this constraint and will show the running Daemons for all versions of Gradle.

The Gradle Daemon is enabled by default, and we recommend always enabling it. There are several ways to disable the Daemon, but the most common one is to add the line

to the file «USER_HOME»/.gradle/gradle.properties, where «USER_HOME» is your home directory. That’s typically one of the following, depending on your platform:

If that file doesn’t exist, just create it using a text editor. You can find details of other ways to disable (and enable) the Daemon in Daemon FAQ further down. That section also contains more detailed information on how the Daemon works.

Note that having the Daemon enabled, all your builds will take advantage of the speed boost, regardless of the version of Gradle a particular build uses.

As mentioned, the Daemon is a background process. You needn’t worry about a build up of Gradle processes on your machine, though. Every Daemon monitors its memory usage compared to total system memory and will stop itself if idle when available system memory is low. If you want to explicitly stop running Daemon processes for any reason, just use the command gradle --stop.

This will terminate all Daemon processes that were started with the same version of Gradle used to execute the command. If you have the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed, you can easily verify that a Daemon has stopped by running the jps command. You’ll see any running Daemons listed with the name GradleDaemon.

The Gradle Tooling API that is used by IDEs and other tools to integrate with Gradle always uses the Gradle Daemon to execute builds. If you are executing Gradle builds from within your IDE you are using the Gradle Daemon and do not need to enable it for your environment.

The Gradle Daemon is a long lived build process. In between builds it waits idly for the next build. This has the obvious benefit of only requiring Gradle to be loaded into memory once for multiple builds, as opposed to once for each build. This in itself is a significant performance optimization, but that’s not where it stops.

A significant part of the story for modern JVM performance is runtime code optimization. For example, HotSpot (the JVM implementation provided by Oracle and used as the basis of OpenJDK) applies optimization to code while it is running. The optimization is progressive and not instantaneous. That is, the code is progressively optimized during execution which means that subsequent builds can be faster purely due to this optimization process. Experiments with HotSpot have shown that it takes somewhere between 5 and 10 builds for optimization to stabilize. The difference in perceived build time between the first build and the 10th for a Daemon can be quite dramatic.

The Daemon also allows more effective in memory caching across builds. For example, the classes needed by the build (e.g. plugins, build scripts) can be held in memory between builds. Similarly, Gradle can maintain in-memory caches of build data such as the hashes of task inputs and outputs, used for incremental building.

Initialization scripts (a.k.a. init scripts) are similar to other scripts in Gradle. These scripts, however, are run before the build starts. Here are several possible uses:

One main limitation of init scripts is that they cannot access classes in the buildSrc project (see Using buildSrc to extract imperative logic for details of this feature).

There are several ways to use an init script:

If more than one init script is found they will all be executed, in the order specified above. Scripts in a given directory are executed in alphabetical order. This allows, for example, a tool to specify an init script on the command line and the user to put one in their home directory for defining the environment and both scripts will run when Gradle is executed.

Similar to a Gradle build script, an init script is a Groovy or Kotlin script. Each init script has a Gradle instance associated with it. Any property reference and method call in the init script will delegate to this Gradle instance.

Each init script also implements the Script interface.

In External dependencies for the build script it was explained how to add external dependencies to a build script. Init scripts can also declare dependencies. You do this with the initscript() method, passing in a closure which declares the init script classpath.

The closure passed to the initscript() method configures a ScriptHandler instance. You declare the init script classpath by adding dependencies to the classpath configuration. This is the same way you declare, for example, the Java compilation classpath. You can use any of the dependency types described in Declaring Dependencies, except project dependencies.

Having declared the init script classpath, you can use the classes in your init script as you would any other classes on the classpath. The following example adds to the previous example, and uses classes from the init script classpath.

Output when applying the init script

Similar to a Gradle build script or a Gradle settings file, plugins can be applied on init scripts.

Output when applying the init script

The plugin in the init script ensures that only a specified repository is used when running the build.

When applying plugins within the init script, Gradle instantiates the plugin and calls the plugin instance’s Plugin.apply(T) method. The gradle object is passed as a parameter, which can be used to configure all aspects of a build. Of course, the applied plugin can be resolved as an external dependency as described in External dependencies for the init script

Such builds come in all shapes and sizes, but they do have some common characteristics:

The settings.gradle file tells Gradle how the project and subprojects are structured. Fortunately, you don’t have to read this file simply to learn what the project structure is as you can run the command gradle projects. Here’s the output from using that command on the Java multiproject build in the Gradle samples:

From a user’s perspective, multi-project builds are still collections of tasks you can run. The difference is that you may want to control which project’s tasks get executed. You have two options here:

The first approach is similar to the single-project use case, but Gradle works slightly differently in the case of a multi-project build. The command gradle test will execute the test task in any subprojects, relative to the current working directory, that have that task. So if you run the command from the root project directory, you’ll run test in api, shared, services:shared and services:webservice. If you run the command from the services project directory, you’ll only execute the task in services:shared and services:webservice.

For more control over what gets executed, use qualified names (the second approach mentioned). These are paths just like directory paths, but use ‘:’ instead of ‘/’ or ‘\’. If the path begins with a ‘:’, then the path is resolved relative to the root project. In other words, the leading ‘:’ represents the root project itself. All other colons are path separators.

This approach works for any task, so if you want to know what tasks are in a particular subproject, just use the tasks task, e.g. gradle :services:webservice:tasks .

Regardless of which technique you use to execute tasks, Gradle will take care of building any subprojects that the target depends on. You don’t have to worry about the inter-project dependencies yourself. If you’re interested in how this is configured, you can read about writing multi-project builds later in the user manual.

There’s one last thing to note. When you’re using the Gradle wrapper, the first approach doesn’t work well because you have to specify the path to the wrapper script if you’re not in the project root. For example, if you’re in the webservice subproject directory, you would have to run ../../gradlew build.

That’s all you really need to know about multi-project builds as a build user. You can now identify whether a build is a multi-project one and you can discover its structure. And finally, you can execute tasks within specific subprojects.

The Gradle build cache is a cache mechanism that aims to save time by reusing outputs produced by other builds. The build cache works by storing (locally or remotely) build outputs and allowing builds to fetch these outputs from the cache when it is determined that inputs have not changed, avoiding the expensive work of regenerating them.

A first feature using the build cache is task output caching. Essentially, task output caching leverages the same intelligence as up-to-date checks that Gradle uses to avoid work when a previous local build has already produced a set of task outputs. But instead of being limited to the previous build in the same workspace, task output caching allows Gradle to reuse task outputs from any earlier build in any location on the local machine. When using a shared build cache for task output caching this even works across developer machines and build agents.

Apart from tasks, artifact transforms can also leverage the build cache and re-use their outputs similarly to task output caching.

By default, the build cache is not enabled. You can enable the build cache in a couple of ways:

When the build cache is enabled, it will store build outputs in the Gradle user home. For configuring this directory or different kinds of build caches see Configure the Build Cache.

Beyond incremental builds described in up-to-date checks, Gradle can save time by reusing outputs from previous executions of a task by matching inputs to the task. Task outputs can be reused between builds on one computer or even between builds running on different computers via a build cache.

We have focused on the use case where users have an organization-wide remote build cache that is populated regularly by continuous integration builds. Developers and other continuous integration agents should load cache entries from the remote build cache. We expect that developers will not be allowed to populate the remote build cache, and all continuous integration builds populate the build cache after running the clean task.

For your build to play well with task output caching it must work well with the incremental build feature. For example, when running your build twice in a row all tasks with outputs should be UP-TO-DATE. You cannot expect faster builds or correct builds when enabling task output caching when this prerequisite is not met.

Task output caching is automatically enabled when you enable the build cache, see Enable the Build Cache.

Since a task describes all of its inputs and outputs, Gradle can compute a build cache key that uniquely defines the task’s outputs based on its inputs. That build cache key is used to request previous outputs from a build cache or store new outputs in the build cache. If the previous build outputs have been already stored in the cache by someone else, e.g. your continuous integration server or other developers, you can avoid executing most tasks locally.

The following inputs contribute to the build cache key for a task in the same way that they do for up-to-date checks:

Task types need to opt-in to task output caching using the @CacheableTask annotation. Note that @CacheableTask is not inherited by subclasses. Custom task types are not cacheable by default.