Getting Started With Gradle

To use gradle, download the binaries and add the bin directory from the extracted directory to the environment PATH. Then, create the directory structure below:

    settings.gradle
    app
        build.gradle
        src
            main
                java
                    com
                        pockettheories
                            Main.java

The settings.gradle file contains the name of the project and the include directive has the name of the directory containing build.gradle:

    rootProject.name = 'gradled'
    include('app')

Within the sub-project directory (app), the build.gradle file is the equivalent of Maven’s pom.xml file - it identifies whether the sub-project is an application or a library, tells gradle to use Maven’s repositories, defines repositories, and sets the class name for the main class:

    plugins {
        id 'application'  // application | lib
    }

    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }

    dependencies {
    }

    application {        // application | lib
        mainClass='com.pockettheories.Main'
    }

The app/src/main/java/com/pockettheories/Main.java file contains the Java source code, which just contains a System.out.println. Execute the application with:

    gradle run

You can get gradle to perform other build stages: gradle clean, gradle build [–scan], gradle jar

When creating a jar file, you ideally want the manifest to contain the main class name. This can be done by adding the following to the build.gradle file:

    tasks.named('jar') {
        manifest {
            attributes('Main-Class': 'com.pockettheories.Main')
        }
    }