Gradle basics

To understand Gradle builds, you need to only consider three basic concepts initially:

• The build script: Gradle automatically looks for a file called build.gradle in the current directory. This file is the build script, which defines the projects and tasks that make up the build.
• Projects: Gradle can work with a single or multiple projects per build. For the purpose of this chapter, we will only be looking at single project builds.
• Tasks: Gradle tasks are the building blocks of the build, for example, compile, test, and clean.

Gradle build scripts

Gradle automatically looks for a file called build.gradle in the current directory and uses this as the build script. For most simple projects, all you ever need to write is a build.gradle file. The source package that accompanies this book has a build.gradle file in the root directory. This is a very simple build script file from which we only care about one main task.

You can test all the code in the book with one Gradle command:

$gradle...