Getting started with tasks

To know which tasks are available on a project, you can run gradlew tasks, which prints out a list of all the available tasks. In a newly created Android project, this includes Android tasks, build tasks, build setup tasks, help tasks, install tasks, verification tasks and other tasks. If you want to see not only the tasks, but also their dependencies, you can run gradlew tasks --all. It is possible to do a dry run of tasks, which prints out all the steps that are executed when running a specific task. This dry run will not actually perform any of these steps, so it is a safe way to see what you can expect to happen when running a certain task. You can do a dry run by adding the parameters -m or --dry-run.

Base tasks

The Android plugin for Gradle makes use of the Java base plugin, which in turn makes use of the base plugin. These add the standard lifecycle tasks and some common convention properties. The base plugin defines the tasks assemble and clean, and the...