August 2025
Table of Contents
Introduction
From the community #
New posts #
- Optimizing Gradle Builds with Dockerized Databases, Flyway, and jOOQ - Benedikt Ritter demonstrates how to streamline Gradle builds that depend on databases, avoiding unnecessary rebuilds even when tasks are up-to-date.
- New Phases—Gradle Configuration Store and Load - Aurimas Liutikas explores the new phases introduced by Gradle’s Configuration Cache and details how to minimize their overhead in modern builds.
- Parallel Bits—Which Parts of Gradle Run in Parallel - Aurimas Liutikas explains how to increase Gradle build performance by enabling different types of parallelism.
- Spring support available on Ubuntu - Canonical highlights the new Devpack for Spring, which simplifies Java development by offering pre-configured plugins and a seamless development experience for both Gradle and Maven.
New videos #
- Getting your Gradle Setup Right, at the Right Time - This video by Marcin Mycek details how to set up a Gradle project in a proper, scalable way.
- Writing your own Gradle Plugin: A Deep Dive - This video by John Rodriguez at droidcon New York 2024 deep dives into advanced Gradle plugin development.
- Gradle Build Cache—Deliver faster by doing less - This webinar explains how the Gradle Build Cache speeds up builds by reusing outputs from previous executions, avoiding redundant work, and helping you deliver software faster.
- The Story of Gradle - This video chronicles the journey of Gradle, from its community-driven origins to its current role as a leading build automation tool, detailing the evolution of its architecture and key milestones.
New releases #
- Embrace has open-sourced its Gradle plugin, formerly known as “Swazzler”, so Android developers can now configure instrumentation and mapping upload directly via an official, documented plugin whose source code is publicly available.
- Shadow 9.0.0 is a major update to the plugin, which has been completely rewritten in Kotlin for improved performance and maintainability. This release introduces new features and breaking changes, so be sure to review the changelog and documentation before upgrading.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Plugin Suite 2.4.0 is now feature-complete, with full support for OpenTofu and Terraform. This release allows for publishing OpenTofu and Terraform modules and generating documentation via the `terraform-docs` tool.
- GradleTest 4.1.0 is now available with preliminary support for testing against Gradle 9.0.0.
From the Gradle team #
Gradle 9.0.0 major release #
Gradle 9.0.0 is a new major release that incorporates many features since version 8.0.
This major release includes:
- The Configuration Cache is now the preferred mode of execution.
- Gradle now supports Groovy 4, Kotlin 2.2+, and the new K2 compiler.
- The minimum required Java version has been raised to Java 17.
👉 Update to Gradle 9.0.0.
How to reduce Maven Central traffic #
At Gradle, we understand the importance of reducing traffic to Maven Central, a critical resource for the JVM community.
This blog post explains how using a caching proxy or artifact repository can improve build times, save on network costs, and prevent throttling issues.
👉 Read the blog post.
New Gradle “Shared Build Logic” course #
We’ve kicked off a new initiative at Gradle: publishing free, online learning courses on YouTube in addition to DPE University.
Our first release is the Gradle Tutorial - Shared Build Logic, a six-part, self-paced series that shows how to centralize and reuse build logic. You’ll learn practical techniques for making your builds more modular, consistent, and maintainable.
👉 Take the course.
Google Summer of Code mid-term update #
Our partnership with the Kotlin Foundation for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 continues, with mentors from across the community guiding five students on impactful Gradle-focused projects. We’re thrilled to announce that all five students successfully passed their mid-term evaluations at the end of July.
Here’s a summary of their impressive progress:
- Improving Configuration Cache Adoption - Nouran Atef is working to facilitate the adoption of Gradle’s Configuration Cache across the ecosystem. She has submitted compatibility patches for several popular plugins (Nebula Lint, Compose Multiplatform Localization, Liquibase) and shared her key learnings in a recent blog post.
- Project Details: Configuration Cache in Key Gradle Plugin
- 👉 Watch the Demo: Mid-term Evaluation Video
- Simplifying Maven Central Publishing - Yongjun Hong has developed new Gradle plugins for Maven Central Publishing. These plugins simplify the process by allowing developers to define project-level defaults for pom.xml files and validate artifacts (including metadata and signing) before publishing.
- Project Details: Maven Central Publishing with New API
- 👉 Watch the Demo: Mid-term Evaluation Video
- Enhancing the IntelliJ Platform Gradle Plugin - Victoria Chuks Alajemba contributed to the IntelliJ Platform Gradle Plugin by improving its reporting capabilities. She also worked on parallelizing verification tasks using Gradle’s Worker API to boost performance.
- Project Details: Improving Reporting and Parallelization
- 👉 Watch the Demo: Mid-term Evaluation Video
- A New Toolchain for Jenkins Plugin Development - Aarav Mahajan released the first version of the Gradle Convention Plugin for Jenkins Plugins. As detailed in his announcement blog, this plugin adds support for key features like Bill of Materials (BOM), the Plugin Compatibility Tester, and default QA configurations.
- Project Details: Jenkins Plugins Toolchain
- 👉 Watch the Demo: Mid-term Evaluation Video
- Better Kotlin Code Quality Reporting - Vanessa Johnson is enhancing static analysis reporting by integrating Gradle’s Problems API into the Detekt and Ktlint plugins. She submitted a pull request with the implementation and shared practical tips for developers in this detailed blog post.
- Project Details: Kotlin Code Quality with Problems API
- 👉 Watch the Demo: Mid-term Evaluation Video
Congratulations to all the contributors on their fantastic progress, and thanks to all mentors and maintainers! We look forward to seeing their final results.
Upcoming events #
Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you and discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, or Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE).
- September 8-9, swampUP by JFrog, Napa - Gradle and JFrog are making a big announcement! This is the #1 Event for DevOps, DevSecOps, and MLOps.
- September 23-24, DPE Summit by Gradle, San Francisco - Registration is open, and speakers have been announced! Don’t miss your chance to attend the only conference dedicated entirely to DPE and DX.
- September 24-26, droidcon Berlin - Europe’s leading Android developer conference. Meet Alex and Mikhail from the Gradle Build Tool team.
- September 29-October 3, GOTO Copenhagen - Catch our very own Java Champion Trisha Gee present “Are your tests slowing you down?”
- October 21-22, Open Source in Finance Forum (NYC) - Meet us at our booth at the premier crossover event for financial services and the open-source ecosystem.
- October 30-31, droidcon London - The #1 conference for all things Android dev. Stop by our booth!
Spread the word #
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The Call for Proposals for the September edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!