Gradle Project API

As discussed earlier, Gradle creates a project object for each build.gradle for us during the initialization phase. This object is available in our build scripts using the project reference. Being a central piece of API, there are numerous methods and properties available on this object.

Project methods

We have been using the project API even without realizing that we are calling methods on the project object. Based on a few governing rules, all the top-level method calls in the build scripts are called on a project object if no explicit reference is provided.

Let's rewrite the very simple build file from Chapter 1, Running Your First Gradle Task to use the project reference for method calls:

project.apply plugin: 'java'

project.repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

project.dependencies {
    testCompile 'junit:junit:4.11'
}

As we saw earlier in this chapter, apply is the method on the project. The so-called dependencies block is actually a method named dependencies() on project...