Essential Gradle Commands

I use some of the gradle commands everyday in my project and many times I had to randomly search in the internet (as I don't remember these commands by heart). This article is for my personal reference, so that I don't have to search it in random places. These commands include running tests, generating binaries, filtering tests, changing property values during runtime, listing available tasks for a project, executing task in a subproject, printing dependencies information etc..

If you have reached this paragraph and your are still interested in reading further down, then happy reading.. :)

For developers working on Windows platform, please replace './gradlew' with gradlew.bat in the following commands

General gradle tasks

List available projects

./gradlew projects

List available properties

./gradlew properties

List available tasks for root project and sub-project

./gradlew tasks :SomeProject:tasks --all

Build a project

Clean the build directory

./gradlew clean

Generate binaries

./gradlew assemble

Run the build (test and assemble)

./gradlew build

Run a smart build for a project

Build the specified project and project it depends on and project which depends on the specified project

./gradlew :SomeProject:buildNeeded :SomeProject:build :SomeProject:buildDependents

Dependencies

Get all Dependencies of subproject

Includes compile, testCompile and runtime

./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencies

Get all compile dependencies

./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencies --configuration compile

Get all test dependencies

./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencies --configuration testCompile

Get all runtime dependencies

./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencies --configuration runtime

Detailed information about a dependency

The dependency resolution or behaviour could vary between compile, testCompile and runtime. Hence we need to analyse it closely to see the behaviour for different context.

Example:
./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencyInsight --dependency selenium-java

./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencyInsight --dependency selenium-java --configuration compile

./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencyInsight --dependency selenium-java --configuration testCompile

./gradlew :SomeProject:dependencyInsight --dependency selenium-java --configuration runtime

Tests and filtering

Run the tests

./gradlew test

Run specific test class or test methods by absolute names

./gradlew test --tests com.example.integration.AllMethodsTest --tests "com.example.integration.SpecificMethodTest.testOne" --tests "com.example.integration.SpecificMethodTest.testTwo"

Run the tests with wildcard filtering

./gradlew test --tests "*FirstTest*" --tests "*SecondTest*.firstTestMethod" --tests "*Third*Test.*test*Methods*" --tests "com.example.package.*FourthTest*"

Disable test task from build and run the tests on demand

In build.gradle file, make the following changes

test.enabled = false

task('endToEndTest', type:Test) {

}

Now to run the end to end tests

./gradlew clean assemble endToEndTest

And the end to end tests will not run as part of build

./gradlew clean build

Handling properties

Passing command line system properties to test

Sometimes it is handy to pass system properties from command line to test java class. This is done to override some default values assumed by the test. But gradle doesn't pass the command line system properties to test, we have to do a small configuration change in order to make it work.

In build.gradle file, make a change to test configuration as below

test {
        systemProperties = System.properties.stringPropertyNames().collectEntries {
            [(it): System.getProperty(it)]
        }
}

Then when executing test through gradle, pass system properties to test by

./gradlew test -Dproperty1=value1 -Dproperty2=value2

Override properties in gradle

The default value for a property (like application's version) can be stored in gradle.properties file on the root directory of your project and the value can be overridden while executing gradle command using -P option. This can be set to git commit sha in continuos delivery environment.

For example:

In gradle.properties

appVersion=1.0

In build.gradle

apply plugin: 'java'

jar {

    baseName = 'sample-application'

    version =  "$appVersion"

}

Then in command line, execute to override 'appVersion' property

./gradlew assemble -PappVersion=2.0

Run tasks in parallel

Parallel running of tasks is particularly useful when you want to start multiple spring boot application in your repository (e.g web application and rest api)

./gradlew :web-application:bootRun :rest-api:bootRun --parallel

Controlling the verbosity of the output

Prints only the task related information

./gradlew clean build

Prints the output of the task or test on the console

./gradlew clean build --info

Prints the debug related information of the task on the console

./gradlew clean build --debug