Gradle is build automation evolved. Gradle can automate the building, testing, publishing, deployment and more of software packages or other types of projects such as generated static websites, generated documentation or indeed anything else.
For more information about Gradle, please visit http://gradle.org.
You can download released versions and nightly build artifacts from http://gradle.org/downloads.
Naturally, Gradle builds itself with Gradle. Gradle provides an innovative wrapper that allows you to work with a Gradle build without having to manually install Gradle. The wrapper is a batch script on Windows and a shell script on other operating systems.
You should use the wrapper to build the gradle project. Generally, you should use the wrapper for any wrapper-enabled project because it guarantees building with the Gradle version that the build was intended to use.
To build the entire Gradle project, you should run the following in the root of the checkout.
./gradlew build
This will compile all the code, generate all the documentation and run all the tests. It can take up to an hour on a fast machine because we have thousands of tests, including integration tests that exercise virtually every Gradle feature. Among the things we test are: compatibility across versions, validity of samples and Javadoc snippets, daemon process capabilities, etc.
To create an install from the source tree you can run either of the following:
./gradlew install -Pgradle_installPath=/usr/local/gradle-source-build
This will create a minimal installation; just what's needed to run Gradle (i.e. no docs). Note that the -Pgradle_installPath denotes where to install to.
You can then build a Gradle built project with this installation:
/usr/local/gradle-source-build/bin/gradle «some task»
To create a full installation (includes docs)…
./gradlew installAll -Pgradle_installPath=/usr/local/gradle-source-build
The Gradle build uses Gradle's ability to customise the logical structure of a multiproject build. All of the build's subprojects are in the subprojects/ directory and are mapped to top level children in settings.gradle.
This means that to build just the core subproject (that lives in subprojects/core) you would run:
./gradlew core:build
Or to build the docs:
./gradlew docs:build
And so on.
If you're looking to contribute to Gradle or provide a patch/pull request, you can find info on how to get in touch with the developers at http://gradle.org/development.
This is a complicated topic and the Gradle development team are happy to help anybody get started working with the Gradle code base, so don't hesitate to get in touch with the developers if you need help working with the finer points of the build.
If you are simply wanting to fix something or adding a small minor feature, it is usually good enough to simply make your change to the code and then run the check task for that subproject. So if the patch was to the launcher package for example, you can run:
./gradlew launcher:check
To run all of the tests and code quality checks for that module.
Please see the readme in the docs subproject.
To open the Gradle project in IDEA, simply run the following task from the root:
./gradlew idea
This will generate appropriate IDEA metadata so that the project can be opened from within IDEA.
The Gradle project is not currently buildable in Eclipse. This is something that will be rectified in the future.
You can try running:
./gradlew eclipse
This command generates Eclipse metadata that allows importing the project into Eclipse. However, you will have to do some manual fixes to the project's setup to make it work.