Chapter 10. Writing Custom Tasks and Plugins

In Gradle, we can either write a simple task in a build file where we add actions with a closure, or we can configure an existing task that is included with Gradle. The process of writing our own task is easy. There are different ways in which we can create a custom task, which we will cover in this chapter.

We will see how we can create a new task class in our build file and use it in our project. Next, we will learn how to create custom tasks in a separate source file. We also learn in this chapter how we can make our task reusable in other projects.

We will learn how to write a plugin for Gradle. Similar to writing custom tasks, we will cover the different ways to write a plugin. We will also see how we can publish our plugin and learn how we can use it in a new project.

We can write our tasks and plugins in Groovy, which works very well with the Gradle API, but we can also use other languages, such as Java and Scala. As long as the code is compiled...