Gradle Essentials

Master the fundamentals of Gradle using real-world projects with this quick and easy-to-read guide

About This Book

• Write beautiful build scripts for various types of projects effortlessly
• Become more productive by harnessing the power and elegance of the Gradle DSL
• Learn how to use Gradle quickly and effectively with this step-by-step guide

Who This Book Is For

This book is for Java and other JVM-based language developers who want to use Gradle or are already using Gradle on their projects.

No prior knowledge of Gradle is required, but some familiarity with build-related terminologies and an understanding of the Java language would help.

What You Will Learn

• Master the Gradle DSL by identifying the building blocks
• Learn just enough Groovy for Gradle
• Set up tests and reports for your projects to make them CI ready
• Create library, stand-alone, and web projects
• Craft multi-module projects quickly and efficiently
• Migrate existing projects to a modern Gradle build
• Extract common build logic into plugins
• Write builds for languages like Java, Groovy, and Scala

In Detail

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.

Kunal Dabir

Kunal Dabir has over 10 years of experience working with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to startups. Currently, he works as a Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is a Java user group's co-organizer and speaks at various meet-ups and conferences. While he is always eager to learn a new language, he usually codes in languages such as Groovy, Scala, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Ruby, and Java. He frequently contributes to open source projects and also hosts his own projects on GitHub. He has always been passionate about automating and scripting. From there, he got a knack for build tools. Apart from Gradle, he has spent a fair amount of time writing build scripts with tools such as Ant, Maven, Grunt, and Gulp. He was introduced to Gradle in 2011 while using Gaelyk. Since then, Gradle has become his tool of choice for build automation. He can be found on Twitter and GitHub as @kdabir.