My usage of Gradle: The Gradle Wrapper

Gradle is great but comes with a lot of flexibility. I have started to take some notes about the way I am using it. I apply those conventions to all my projects. I am not a gradle expert, so I am happy to discuss my patterns in the issues of this blog.

The Gradle Wrapper

See the official doc: the Gradle Wrapper

Definition in the root build file

I have decided to put the version I am using in my root build.gradle file:

wrapper {
    gradleVersion = 'a.b.c'
    // distributionType = Wrapper.DistributionType.ALL
}

Most often I do not need the ALL distribution type, even if this is suggested by some IDEs.

Update the wrapper version

My how-to:

• Change the value of the gradleVersion attribute.
• Run ./gradlew wrapper to update the jar. (can be gradle if this is the first time the wrapper is installed)
• Run ./gradlew wrapper a second time.

The second run is necessary because at this point in time the targeted gradle version will be used, meaning that the scripts gradlew and gradlew.bat will be generated with this version of Gradle.

Alias for the terminal

To not have to type ./gradlew each time I need gradle, I have this entry in my ~/.bash_profile file:

alias gw='./gradlew'

GitHub action

As recommended on the documentation page, for my public repositories on GitHub I have activated the GitHub action to verify the integrity of the wrapper.