The Gradle Newsletter

Gradle Build Tool February 2026 Newsletter

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New posts

Reinforcement Learning - Iñaki Villar explores using reinforcement learning to optimize Gradle builds
Benchmarking Gradle - Profiling configuration times with Aurimas Liutikas and Márton Braun
Spray and Pray - How broad Spotless target patterns can dramatically slow configuration time
GMM Wiki - A community wiki to document Gradle metadata attributes

Modernizing Apache Kafka’s CI webinar

Ever wonder how a massive project like Apache Kafka keeps its builds fast and reliable?

On March 12, join Apache Kafka PMC David Arthur to see how Kafka modernized its CI pipeline using Develocity and GitHub Actions. Learn how they tackled flaky tests, optimized build times, and improved developer productivity at scale.

👉 Register today

From Gradle

Gradle 9.4.0 release candidate

The first release candidate for Gradle 9.4 is officially live! This update is all about better visibility—both on the console and in your test reports—while keeping you on the bleeding edge of the ecosystem with early Java 26 support.

Give it a test drive: Update your wrapper now to help us polish the final release: ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=9.4.0-rc-1

👉 Release notes

From Develocity

Develocity IntelliJ Plugin 1.2

Stop jumping between your IDE and Develocity to investigate failures. The Develocity IntelliJ Plugin 1.2 brings “Test History” directly to your code:

Inlay Hints: Your tests written in Java, Kotlin, and Groovy are now decorated with real-time pass/fail and flakiness trends.
Team-Wide Visibility: Get aggregated insights into flaky tests in CI or failures on your teammates’ branches.

🚀 AI-Powered Troubleshooting: Check out our latest blog post from Java Champion Trisha Gee. Learn how the plugin integrates with AI agents to answer questions like “Why did this fail in CI but not locally?” by analyzing Develocity data directly in your editor.

👉 Read more

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).

March 12, Gradle Technologies hosted webinar — Get Apache Kafka’s lessons-learned modernizing builds with Develocity and GitHub Actions.
March 26-27, IntelliJ IDEA Conf 2026 – Free virtual event with Stefan Wolf showing how to use IntelliJ IDEA with Develocity and AI for faster troubleshooting.
May 20-22, KotlinConf – The official JetBrains conference devoted to the Kotlin programming language.

Spread the word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter.

Find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the March edition is now open!

Gradle Build Tool January 2026 Newsletter

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New posts

Going Offline – Achieve reproducible, network-free builds using dependency locking and pre-fetching.
Kotlin vs R8 – See how aggressive CI cleanup causes unexpected build failures and performance hits.

New videos

Gradle 9 + KMP Projects – Overview of the breaking changes in Gradle 9 that impact KMP builds and how to migrate.

New releases

Android Gradle Plugin 9.0.0 – AGP 9.0 is a major release that brings API and behavior changes.

From the Gradle team

Gradle 9.3.0 release

In Gradle 9.3.0, HTML test reports get an IDE-style hierarchy for nested and parameterized tests, no more hunting through flat lists! We’ve also pinned stdout/stderr to individual tests and introduced a tabbed interface for aggregate reports.

Alongside this, bash/zsh completion v9.3.0 is out now and will remain synchronized with all future major and minor Gradle releases. Check the full release notes for more!

👉 Release notes

New course: Authoring Gradle plugins

We’ve just launched a brand-new self-paced course on our learning platform, DPE University. This course is designed to help you write your first Gradle plugin.

The course is also available on the Gradle YouTube channel.

👉 Take the course

From the Develocity team

Upcoming webinar: Scale throughput with Develocity Universal Cache

Whether it’s the 5x surge in commits driven by GenAI or the increasing complexity of modern applications, CI infrastructure is under unprecedented stress.

Join the Develocity team on January 28 to discover how to make your CI infrastructure keep pace with your commit volume.

👉 Save your spot

New strategic insights for engineering leaders

AI is rewriting the rules of DevOps, demanding a fundamental rethink of infrastructure and speed. Our two latest deep dives offer a technical masterclass for leaders looking to stabilize their CI/CD environments while meeting the unprecedented demands of AI-scale development.

Build Artifact CDN: Strategic Infrastructure for AI-Driven DevOps - Learn how Universal Cache acts as a critical “Build Artifact CDN”.
Pipeline Acceleration: Strategic Imperative in the GenAI Era - Explore how accelerating your build and test cycles directly impacts DORA outcomes.

👉 Read more

Upcoming events

January 28, (Webinar) CI without the wait: Scale throughput with Develocity Universal Cache – GenAI code volume is overloading CI. Learn why comprehensive caching is the clear path back to CI efficiency.
February 19, (Webinar) Automating governance from build to release with Gradle and JFrog – Explore how the emerging practice of Continuous Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) ensures the integrity of the build process in today’s AI-powered development world.
May 20-22, KotlinConf – The official JetBrains conference devoted to the Kotlin programming language.

Spread the word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter—let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the February edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool December 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New posts

Is the Java Ecosystem Cursed? A Dependency Analysis Perspective – Tony Robalik dissects the inherent complexities and anti-patterns in the Java ecosystem (like split packages, shading, reliance on classpath order, and compiler differences) that make static dependency analysis and build integrity challenging.
Detecting Maven-Hijack-style risks in Gradle builds with the Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin – Laura Kassovic highlights the supply chain risk of Maven-Hijack, which weaponizes duplicate classes on the classpath, and how the Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin (DAGP) enhances security by checking for binary-incompatible duplicate classes.
Knocker-Uppers - PGP Validation of Gradle Wrapper and Distribution – Aurimas Liutikas addresses the critical supply chain risk of the Gradle Wrapper and a new defense layer: the ability to use PGP keys to validate the cryptographic signatures of both the gradle-wrapper.jar and the downloaded Gradle distribution zip.

New videos

The Benevolent Gradle Overlord: Keeping Order – Aurimas Liutikas @ droidcon London 2025 provides strategies for build engineers and platform teams to maintain build health, stability, and speed in the face of rapidly growing codebases and increasing team constraints.
Fix Flaky Android Builds Forever with Gradle Dependency Locking – Codetutor explains the problem of build non-determinism (flaky builds) and demonstrates the four-step process of implementing Gradle dependency locking and the version catalog to ensure consistent dependency resolution and reproducible builds.
Understanding Gradle caches (in French) – Florian Le Ficher @ GDG Paris Android User Group provides a detailed breakdown of Gradle’s various caching mechanisms, where they are stored, how to analyze their impact, and how the BackMarket team implemented custom logic to manage CI caching effectively.

New releases

Spock 2.4 - The popular testing and specification framework for Java and Groovy now offers support for Groovy 5. Don’t forget to check out their new website.
Spring Boot 4.0.0 – This major release brings full support for Gradle 9 and continues the modularization effort for building robust, modern Spring Boot applications.

From the Gradle team

The year in review

The year 2025 showcased the massive scale and adoption of the Gradle ecosystem, which recorded over 600 million downloads and saw nearly 2 billion plugins downloaded from the Gradle Plugin Portal. This unprecedented growth was driven and supported by a commitment to core quality, headlined by the release of Gradle 9.0.0. This definitive release cemented our focus on speed and developer experience, introducing key features that set a new standard for performance and stability:

Configuration Cache – Gradle promoted Configuration Cache to the preferred execution mode, with graceful fallback and improved encryption to reduce accidental data exposure.
Daemon JVM auto-provisioning – Gradle introduced the capability to automatically download the JVM required by the Daemon.
Modern Java & languages – Gradle raised its core requirement to Java 17+, added support for Java 24/25, and upgraded to Groovy 4 and Kotlin 2.2 for improved performance and memory usage.
Reproducible archives by default – Gradle ensured deterministic outputs by enforcing that archives (JARs, WARs, etc.) are built consistently across different environments.
Kotlin DSL – Gradle leveraged the K2 compiler, improved script compilation avoidance, and switched to JSpecify on the Gradle API for stricter nullability handling.

More 2025 highlights you might have missed:

Gradle Best Practices Guide – Gradle released an opinionated “Do This, Not That” guide created with Google and JetBrains to help teams avoid common pitfalls.
Maven Central Publishing and Mirroring – Gradle worked with Maven Central to minimize unnecessary traffic and provided tooling recommendations for publishing after the Sonatype OSSRH sunset.
Official Gradle Docker Images – Gradle took over the official images (now with 100M+ downloads and counting).
Declarative Gradle – Work continued toward declarative and toolable build definitions.

👉 See you in 2026!

Netflix open-sources the Nebula ArchRules plugin

This November, Netflix open-sourced the Nebula ArchRules Plugin. Built on the excellent ArchUnit library, this Gradle plugin provides a structured system for authoring, sharing, and enforcing custom architectural patterns and API usage rules across large organizations with multiple repositories.

While Netflix has provided some initial open-source rule libraries, the true power lies in writing your own specialized rules.

👉 Write a rule

From the Develocity team

Develocity 2025.4 release

We’re excited to announce Develocity 2025.4, which offers powerful new features and enhancements:

AI-powered build and test failure grouping across builds and projects: Gain immediate, actionable, AI-driven insights into recurring build and test failures across the entire build history of all your projects, exposed via an MCP server.
AI-powered Develocity Analytics: Query aggregated Develocity build data using natural language to gain immediate, actionable, AI-driven insights on how to accelerate, stabilize, and cost-optimize your builds and projects, exposed via an MCP server.
Develocity Artifact Cache and Setup Cache: Extend caching to your entire build lifecycle, accelerating build initialization and dependency resolution to reduce overhead in ephemeral CI environments.
Develocity Provenance Governor: Automate Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) across your entire software supply chain, ensuring that only trusted and compliant artifacts are promoted and consumed across environments.

👉 Read more

Develocity launches Universal Cache

We’re excited to share the launch of Develocity Universal Cache, a critical new capability designed to fundamentally address CI/CD pipeline bottlenecks, which are increasingly strained by the explosion of AI-generated code and the complexity of ephemeral CI environments.

Universal Cache establishes a unified, globally distributed caching layer that combines three essential caching components to accelerate every stage of your build:

Artifact Cache (input caching): Speeds up the start of every build by efficiently caching and restoring critical build inputs, including dependencies, JDK toolchains, and build system artifacts. This dramatically cuts down dependency download time and costs, turning what used to be 40+ minutes of idle CI time into just a few minutes.
Setup Cache (environment caching): Eliminates redundant initialization work, such as compiling build scripts, by sharing the resulting configuration across all CI agents. This ensures that builds running on CI begin executing faster.
Build Cache (output caching): Continues to accelerate task execution by reusing outputs from previous builds, preventing redundant work across machines and minimizing the time spent on unnecessary rebuilding.

By making caching observable through Develocity 360 and addressing inputs, setup, and outputs in a unified platform, Universal Cache offers a strategic solution to achieve the rapid throughput required in modern software delivery.

👉 Learn more

Upcoming events

January 28, Gradle webinar (online) – Stop waiting for CI: Develocity Universal Cache solves the commit volume problem. Stay tuned for sign-up details.
April 16-18, Devoxx France – France’s premier developer conference covering Java, Cloud, Security, and more.
May 14-16, Devoxx UK – A top conference for developers in the UK, focusing on the latest in Java, Cloud, and Software Engineering.
May 20-22, KotlinConf – The official JetBrains conference devoted to the Kotlin programming language.
June 23-26, JavaOne – The largest conference celebrating the global Java ecosystem.

Next year’s event schedule coming soon!

Spread the word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter—let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the January edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool November 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New posts

Unreasonable Configuration – Aurimas explores how mis-structured Gradle configuration in large builds leads to unreasonable build times, and proposes strategies to simplify and refactor the configuration model.
Cache Cache No Cache – Aurimas details how Gradle Build Cache usage should follow a “trust gradient”: local devs and pre-merge CI can read from (but not write to) the remote cache, only post-merge CI can write, and release CI should avoid remote cache entirely and rebuild from scratch.
Why Agentic AI Tools Struggle with Maven’s Lifecycle Model – Benedikt examines why modern AI agents falter when working with Maven’s lifecycles, and reflects on lessons that build tool designers (including Gradle) should learn.
Gradle Debugging Techniques – Martin walks through practical debugging patterns for Gradle builds, from logging and tools to task graph inspection and performance tuning.
Maven-Hijack: Software Supply Chain Attack Exploiting Packaging Order – This paper introduces Maven-Hijack, a supply chain attack that exploits dependency packaging order and JVM class resolution to silently override core application behavior by injecting an identically named malicious class.
How to Win Friends and Influence Internal Visibility – Joe describes turning Kotlin friendPaths into a practical pattern: wiring modules are granted friend access to implementation modules via a custom Gradle configuration and an IntelliJ plugin that suppresses incorrect internal-visibility errors, preserving modular encapsulation without wrecking developer UX.

New videos

Speeding up inner dev loop with Gradle Configuration Cache – Alex and Mikhail @ droidcon Berlin give a practical look at how the Configuration Cache shrinks feedback loops for everyday development, with concrete examples of what you need to change (and avoid) in your build.
Gradle: Your Build, Your Rules – Aurimas @ DPE Summit provides a tour of Gradle’s flexibility: custom logic, plugins, and build configuration patterns that let you shape the build to your team instead of the other way around.
Faster Feedback Cut Gradle Build and Pipeline Times in Half – James @ droidcon Berlin gives a case-study-style session on how to tackle a slow pipeline by systematically cutting build and CI times—including ideas you can lift straight into your own setup.

New releases

Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin (DAGP) 3.3.0 - A new release of the popular plugin that analyzes project dependencies for issues like unused or misconfigured artifacts.
Grolifant Library 5.5.1 - A general update to the underlying library used by many popular plugins.
Webdriver Binaries Plugin 4.0.0 - The plugin has a new maintainer, is now compatible with Gradle 9 and Configuration Cache, and features breaking DSL changes.
IaC Plugin 2.5.0 - A release updating support for Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, and TfDocs.
Cloud CI Plugin 5.1.0 - A new minor release for the Cloud CI integration plugin.
GradleTest Plugin 4.2.0 - A minor release for the plugin facilitating advanced Gradle testing scenarios.

From the Gradle team

Gradle 9.2.0 release

Gradle 9.2.0 brings several new features and improvements:

Windows ARM support – Gradle can now run natively on Windows ARM devices
Enhanced publishing API – New capabilities for defining and publishing custom software components
Smarter error & warning reporting – Clearer suggestions (especially for dependency verification failures) and improved diagnostics

👉 Upgrade now

Help us grow the Gradle Best Practices

Engineers from Gradle, JetBrains, and Google have already helped us create one of our most popular resources: the Gradle Best Practices guide. But there’s so much more we can capture—such as patterns you rely on, tips that make your builds faster, and hard-won knowledge that deserves to be shared.

We’re opening this up to the community and would love your input.

Tell us what best practices you use, what’s missing, or what you want clarified.

👉 Join the discussion

New Training: Introduction to Gradle for Build Engineers

We’ve just launched a brand-new self-paced course on our learning platform, DPE University. This course is designed to help you unlock the full power of Gradle Build Tool. Whether you’re a Kotlin, Java, or multi-stack developer, this training takes you from basic build setups to performance enhancements and developer productivity wins.

The course will also soon be available on the Gradle YouTube channel. However if you want to take the course now on DPE University you can click on the link below.

👉 Explore the course

Dependabot support for the Gradle Wrapper

Dependabot just added support for updating the Gradle Wrapper, making it easier to stay current with the latest Gradle releases. When enabled, Dependabot will open PRs that bump your wrapper version and update the checksum automatically—no scripts and no manual checks.

It currently works for standard wrapper layouts and is behind a feature flag, with full script updates coming later.

A small change with big convenience: effortless Gradle version hygiene!

👉 Check it out

From the Develocity team

Develocity IntelliJ Plugin 1.0.2 release

We’ve all seen AI dramatically accelerate development, but at the same time, introduce more complex failures. To ensure your troubleshooting speed can keep pace with the speed of AI code—so you can achieve fast and reliable software delivery—we’ve been working on the free Develocity plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.

Version 1.0.2 includes key performance improvements along with several UI enhancements. You can now control timeline and resource graph heights via a split pane, configure timeline refresh rates (10ms to 5s), and see visual confirmation in the UI when auto-scroll is active.

In a recent webinar, we demonstrated how to use the Develocity IntelliJ plugin alongside Develocity’s AI-powered troubleshooting features for rapidly resolving complex failures and performance issues—all from directly within the IDE.

If you missed it, don’t worry, you can watch the recording here!

👉 Get the plugin

Upcoming events

Dec 4-5, KCD Suisse Romande - One day focused on cloud native projects and the local community.

Next year’s event schedule coming soon!

Spread the word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter—let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the December edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool October 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New posts

Shrinking Elephants – Tony Robalik and Josh Friend detail how they cut IntelliJ/Gradle syncs in a giant Kotlin monorepo from minutes to ~15s.
Input to Your Inputs: What Invalidates Gradle Configuration Cache? – Aurimas Liutikas explores how Gradle determines task inputs behind the scenes and explains the mechanics of task dependency inference to help you write more accurate and cache-friendly builds.
Develocity IntelliJ Plugin: Speed Up Gradle Builds with Local Insights – The Gradle team introduces an IntelliJ plugin that surfaces build performance insights (e.g., slow tasks, cache misses, and configuration issues) directly in the IDE and offers guided fixes so you can speed up Gradle builds without leaving your editor. Don’t miss the webinar.
Gradle Version Checking – Aurimas Liutikas shows how to fail fast when the wrong Gradle version is used, align IDE and CI, and roll out repo-wide guards to reduce “works on my machine” drift and support smooth upgrades.
How to Configure Gradle: The Ultimate Guide – Serhii Hryshyn walks through advanced Gradle configuration techniques, covering topics such as buildscript blocks, plugin management, dependency resolution strategies, and performance optimizations.
Android Optimized R8 – Sergio De Simone covers enhancements to R8 that focus on Android optimization, detailing how the updated code shrinker improves performance and reduces APK size.

New videos

Carefree Dependency Management in Java Projects (8-part video series) – A hands-on series from Jendrik Johannes at javarca.de on keeping Gradle/Maven builds stable without fuss.
Integrating Kotlin Code into the Gradle Build Process – This talk by Michael Ehrmann at droidcon Berlin 2025 shows how to weave Kotlin code seamlessly into the Gradle build pipeline, covering best practices, plugin usage, and tips for maintaining cohesive build logic.

New releases

JRuby Gradle Plugin 2.2.0 has a major new feature, making alternative gem sources much easier to adopt.
Asciidoctor Gradle Plugin 5.0.0-alpha.1 marks the beginning of the next major version of the plugin. This release introduces important updates and lays the groundwork for future improvements.
CycloneDX Gradle Plugin 3.0.1 has been updated to Gradle 9. This plugin produces a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) covering both direct and transitive project dependencies.
OpenRewrite Gradle Plugin 7.18.0 helps automate technical debt elimination and code transformation via rewrite rules. This latest release includes best practices!

From the Gradle team

Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.2.2

If you’re not already publishing a Build Scan® whenever you build your Gradle projects, now is the perfect time to try. The Develocity Gradle Plugin (formerly the Build Scan plugin) makes it effortless, and our Build Scan service is completely free to use.

A Build Scan gives you instant visibility into how your build behaves by showing detailed performance breakdowns, dependency resolution insights, test results with stack traces, and more. In case of multiple failures, the Build Scan will group failures with the same reason together to streamline the troubleshooting experience.

For example, the Build Scan below quickly reveals which direct dependency (minio) pulled in a vulnerable transitive dependency (bouncycastle). Just two clicks to the answer:

Here, Build Scan finds that 40 failures boil down to 4 root-cause groups:

Because each Build Scan is a simple shareable URL, troubleshooting with teammates becomes dramatically easier. To learn more, visit our Build Scan page.

The latest release, Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.2.2, is now available.

👉 Ready to try it? Add the Develocity Gradle Plugin to your build.

Develocity MCP server for Agentic AI

The Develocity Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides AI agents with access to Develocity data, enabling developers and build engineers to effectively troubleshoot build failures, build reliability issues, and performance concerns with their preferred AI assistant.

For instance, one can set up Copilot to use the MCP server and use the following prompts:

“Why did my last build fail?”
“Which tests are the flakiest this week in CI?”
“What changed between builds X and Y?”
“Why is build X slow?”

In the screenshot below, the agent used the Develocity MCP Server to understand the root cause of the build failure and suggest fixes.

👉 Interested in our Limited Availability? Contact us.

Develocity Artifact Cache

Ephemeral CI builds are a de facto industry standard in modern development. This crucial shift, however, comes with its own set of challenges:

Redundant work because every build starts from scratch,
Instabilities coming from consuming services like dependency or toolchain repositories, and
Escalating data transfer costs from repeatedly downloading the same artifacts.

We’re tackling this directly with our newest product: Develocity Artifact Cache is a powerful new caching layer designed to turbocharge your CI builds and pipelines.

The Artifact Cache is a distributed, highly available, high-throughput solution that seamlessly complements your existing Build Cache. While the Build Cache speeds up task execution by caching build outputs, the Artifact Cache caches build inputs like dependencies, toolchains, wrappers, and Gradle configuration.

Early pilots show significant gains from dependency caching alone, with up to 40% in build time savings.

Watch this presentation from DPE Summit 2025 to learn more.

👉 Interested in joining our early access program? Contact us.

Develocity Provenance Governor preview

Remember Log4Shell? The painful scramble wasn’t just about a bad library; it was about not knowing where risky artifacts came from and where they were being used throughout your software development lifecycle. With software supply-chain attacks on the rise, our product, Develocity Provenance Governor, makes that kind of incident far easier to identify and resolve. Most importantly, you can prove it.

Using deep provenance data from Develocity Build Scan®, Provenance Governor continuously evaluates every artifact across local and CI builds and blocks unverified toolchain inputs before they reach production. It gives CISOs and DevSecOps a practical, shift-left approach to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) with clear provenance, policy enforcement, and auditable decisions. It enables your organization to practice continuous GRC through automation.

Provenance Governor seamlessly integrates with partner ecosystems, starting with JFrog AppTrust, so it fits alongside your existing registries and pipelines.

👉 Interested in how we can help protect your organization? Contact us.

DPE Summit 2025

We recently wrapped up DPE Summit 2025, our flagship event dedicated entirely to Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) and Developer Experience (DX).

If you couldn’t attend, no worries! We’re publishing most of the session recordings online. Check out a few of our favorite talks on AI:

Nachiappan Nagappan, Meta - Measuring the Impact of AI on Developer Productivity at Meta
Vic Iglesias, Netflix - Developer Productivity in the Age of GenAI
Szczepan Faber and Mike Nakhimovich, Airbnb - Agentic coding at Airbnb
Abi Noda, DX, and Nicole Forsgren - Developer Experience in the AI Era
Venkad Dhandapani, Salesforce - Salesforce’s AI Journey for Developer Productivity: From Single Tool to Multi-Agent Development Ecosystem

👉 Explore all the videos here. More coming soon!

Upcoming events

October 28-30, GitHub Universe - GitHub’s two-day developer event celebrating innovation. Laura and Tom will discuss the new Dependency Graph for Gradle feature.
October 30-31, droidcon London - The #1 conference for all things Android. Stop by our booth and meet Louis from the Gradle Build Tool team and Android experts from the Develocity team!

Spread the word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter—let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the November edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool September 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New posts

Gradle modularization delivers 3x faster Android builds - Wojtek Zięba explains how a modularized architecture for Android apps can drastically improve build performance using the Pocket Casts app as a case study.
Classloader isolation 101 - Martin Bonnin discusses the importance of classloader isolation for Gradle plugins to prevent common issues like dependency conflicts and unnecessary build invalidation.
Gradle Tower of Babel - Building on top of other plugins - Aurimas Liutikas provides a brief guide on how to build a Gradle plugin that extends another plugin, such as the Android Gradle Plugin (AGP), while avoiding common pitfalls.
Custom repository metadata formats, or, PyPI in Gradle - Luke Bemish explains how to configure Gradle to work with unsupported dependency metadata formats, using PyPI packages as a case study.

New videos

JavaRCAde #0 – Modules in Java development - This video by Gradle fellow Jendrik Johannes is the first part of a new series explaining the JavaRCA recipe for carefree dependency management in Java projects.

From the Gradle team

Gradle 9.1.0 release

Gradle 9.1.0 brings several new features and improvements:

Java 25 support: Gradle now supports Java 25 for both the daemon and through toolchains.
CLI & visualization: New tools for visualizing task graphs and an enhanced project report improve the command-line experience.
Configuration Cache: The cache is more effective with a new read-only mode for CI and smarter handling of command-line properties.
Build authoring: Plugin authors get new APIs for lazy attribute copying and type-safe accessors for `compileOnly` dependencies.
Plugin improvements: The Antlr, EAR, and Publishing plugins received targeted enhancements for better functionality.
Error reporting: Version conflict error messages are now clearer, making dependency issues easier to diagnose.

👉 Upgrade now.

We now maintain the official Gradle Docker image

We’re excited to share that the official Gradle Docker image is now under our direct care. This means you can count on it to be fully aligned with our releases and to get timely updates for your containerized builds and CI/CD pipelines.

And a huge thank you to community member Keegan Witt for his tireless work on the image over the years.

👉 Read the blog post to learn more.

Level up your builds with plugins from the Gradle team

The Gradle team and fellow contributors have been busy releasing a new tool for Spring Boot developers and updating several key plugins to help you build faster and smarter. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new and what’s been improved:

The new Spring Initializr Gradle plugin provides a robust, pre-configured boilerplate for your Spring Boot projects. Inspired by DPE University and Gradle Best Practices, it’s more than just a tool—it’s a reference implementation that integrates essential features like CI/CD, build cache optimization, and advanced testing with Gradle TestKit and Spock. It even includes code quality analysis via CodeNarc to ensure your projects start on a solid foundation.
Asciidoctor Gradle 4.0.5: This new version is out, ready to help you convert your AsciiDoc documentation using Gradle.
Plugin Publishing Plugin 2.0.0: The plugin used to publish Gradle plugins has been updated with Configuration Cache compatibility, which means faster builds for plugin authors and users alike.

👉 Check out the Gradle Plugin Portal.

Develocity 2025.3 release

Develocity 2025.3 introduces new features and enhancements aimed at improving build and test efficiency:

Develocity MCP server for Agentic AI: This new server makes the build data captured in Develocity available to AI assistants.
Comprehensive npm dependency insights: The new Dependencies view in Build Scan® for npm provides detailed information on all direct and transitive dependencies.
sbt Build Cache effectiveness: Analyze new metrics like “avoidance savings” and “build cache overhead” to optimize the performance of your sbt builds.
Develocity Reporting and Visualization enhancements: npm builds are now included in the Dependencies cross-project dashboard, and the Develocity Reporting Kit 2.0 provides a new, standardized database interface to connect your preferred data visualization tools.

👉 Learn more.

IntelliJ plugin 1.0.0 release

The Develocity Plugin for IntelliJ 1.0.0 brings real-time Gradle build analysis directly into your development workflow. You can now monitor task execution, resource usage, and build performance without publishing a dedicated Develocity instance or Build Scan® (unless you want to).

Recently, while building Gradle’s documentation (./gradlew :docs:docs), we used the IntelliJ Plugin to find which tasks were consuming the most time and CPU. The main performance culprits were quickly identified and optimized, which turned out to be our DSL generation:

👉 Try it out.

Upcoming events

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 and meet Louis from the Gradle Build Tool team!

Spread the word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter—let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the October edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool August 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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

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

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter—let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the September edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool July 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New posts

Nmcp and the other 90% - Martin Bonnin introduces the Nmcp plugin and shares the journey to its 1.0.0 release (including the challenges it solves and the motivation behind its development).
Avoiding common mistakes in Gradle plugin development - Dmitry Glazunov shares real-world lessons on avoiding subtle plugin pitfalls that lead to slow, fragile builds.

New videos

Software Delivery Excellence in the age of AI – In this fireside chat, Scala creator Martin Odersky and Gradle founder Hans Dockter join Trisha Gee to discuss how AI-generated code is changing developer productivity.
Fix Slow Gradle Builds Before They Ruin Your Life – Gradle expert Shannon Pamperl shares tips for speeding up Gradle builds, avoiding eager task creation, and improving IDE sync times.

New releases

Develocity Plugin for IntelliJ 0.5.0 is out! This plugin brings real-time Gradle build analysis directly into your IDE, no Develocity instance or Build Scan® required. It helps developers optimize build performance and gain actionable insights as they work.
Nmcp 1.0.0 is out! The Nmcp project provides publishing capability to Maven Central using the new Portal Publisher API.
Java-module-packaging 1.1 is out! This plugin helps you package modern Java applications with the Java Module System and jpackage. It works seamlessly with other org.gradlex plugins for dependency management and application deployment.
Shadow 9.0.0-rc1 is out! This major release candidate of the popular Shadow plugin includes a full rewrite in Kotlin for better maintainability and performance.

From the Gradle team

Gradle 9 release candidate 3 is ready

The third release candidate of Gradle 9.0.0 is ready, and we’d love your feedback.

Highlights include:

The Configuration Cache is now the preferred mode of execution.
Gradle now supports Kotlin 2.2+ and the new K2 compiler.
The minimum required Java version has been raised to Java 17.
We’ve also removed many previously deprecated APIs.

RC3 (and RC2) includes additional documentation, dependency resolution patches, nullability improvements, and minor Configuration Cache fixes introduced since RC1.

The GA release is expected soon.

For an overview of the changes between Gradle 8.0 and Gradle 9.0.0, along with demos and videos, see What’s New in Gradle 9.

👉 In the meantime, test the RC.

Publish your JVM library to Maven Central

In our latest video, learn how to publish your JVM library to Maven Central using a Gradle community plugin, compatible with the 2025 updates to the Maven Central publishing process.

The tutorial goes over key prerequisites that include:

Setting up a Maven Central account and namespace.
Creating a GPG public/private key pair for required artifact signing and verification.
Adding configuration to enable publishing in your build file, including providing POM file values.

For more tips about publishing, check out the Publishing to Maven Central Cookbook page.

👉 Watch the YouTube video.

Develocity 2025.2 and Develocity IntelliJ plugin release

We’re thrilled to unveil Develocity 2025.2, full of powerful updates designed to help you transform your build and test processes for greater speed and reliability. Here’s a quick look at the highlights:

AI-powered failure grouping in Build Scan®: Automatically identify and group recurring Gradle and Maven build/test failures with AI.
npm Failure Analytics: Detect and prioritize npm build/test failures, flakiness, and slowness in JavaScript and TypeScript projects.
Improved reporting: Use new dashboards and filters for faster, clearer insights into build and test performance.
Develocity Edge: Run Develocity services closer to developers for faster, more reliable builds.

👉 Check out the 2025.2 Release Notes.

This release also includes a beta version of the Develocity Plugin for IntelliJ. This new plugin brings real-time Gradle build insights directly into your IntelliJ IDE:

Live build timeline: Visualize task execution and resource consumption (CPU, memory) of your Gradle builds as they run.
Streamlined Develocity configuration: Streamlines applying and configuring the Develocity Gradle plugin.

Troubleshooting and optimizing your builds has never been easier. Install the plugin from the JetBrains Marketplace in seconds and get started.

👉 Try out the new Develocity IntelliJ Plugin.

Dependabot adds support for Gradle lockfiles

You can now automate updates to your Gradle dependency lockfiles (gradle.lockfile) using GitHub’s Dependabot. This makes it easier to keep your dependencies secure and up to date while still benefiting from the control and stability of lockfiles.

👉 Read the GitHub Blog.

Upcoming events

August 3-10, JCrete - Oleg Nenashev will join this un-conference focused on the Java tooling ecosystem and developer productivity.
August 19-21, Scala Days - Come visit the Gradle team and hear from Gradle Senior Software Engineer Martin Duhem on “Exploring Build Caching: A Practical Overview”.
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.

Spread the word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter—let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the August edition is now open, and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool June 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From The Community

New Posts

Toast turns up the heat on slow builds With Gradle and DPE by Todd R. Weiss - Learn all about how Toast significantly reduced their build times from 78 to 27 minutes by adopting Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) practices
From spaghetti to strategy: Managing Gradle in large Android codebases by Jamshidbek Boynazarov - Delve into the challenges of scaling Gradle configurations in expansive Android projects
Brief history of POM file proliferation by Aurimas Liutikas - A review of POM file limitations and how Gradle’s metadata model improves JVM dependency resolution

New Videos

KotlinConf - Fast inner dev loops - Alex and Rodrigo (from Gradle) talk about speeding up Kotlin Gradle builds
IntelliJ IDEA Conference live stream day 2 - Catch Paul (from Gradle) and Dmitriy (from IntelliJ) talk about IntelliJ IDEA, the IDE that speaks Gradle
Quarkus Insights episode #207 - The Gradle team talks about Configuration Cache compatibility in your builds
Master Gradle faster with the Gradle build Bible - Tom Gregory’s comprehensive course will help you master Gradle fundamentals

New Releases

Version 2.4 of the JVM Dependency Conflict Resolution Plugin introduces improved diagnostics and compatibility for managing dependency version conflicts
Version 2.0.0 of the IAC Plugin introduces robust support for Terraform and OpenTofu, with breaking DSL changes and a minimum requirement of Gradle 7.3.3 and JDK 11
Caupain is a new Gradle plugin from Deezer that helps you keep version catalogs up to date
Elide is a new Gradle plugin that integrates the Elide runtime and toolchain, powered by GraalVM, for faster Java, Kotlin, JS/TS, and Python builds

From The Gradle Team

Gradle Hits An All-Time Record

🎉 Gradle Build Tool now exceeds 50 million monthly downloads!

This includes downloads via the Gradle Wrapper, Tooling API, and direct links from services.gradle.org. The actual number is even higher when factoring in mirrors, Docker images, and package managers.

A huge thank you to the entire community of developers, contributors, and build engineers who continue to choose and improve Gradle. Surpassing 50 million monthly downloads is a reflection of your trust and the project’s growing impact. Your feedback and contributions shape the future of build automation.

Help others discover Gradle by starring our GitHub repository.

Gradle 9 Release Candidate

The first release candidate is ready, and we’d love your feedback.

Highlights include:

The Configuration Cache is now the preferred mode of execution and we recommend it for all new projects. Check out the announcement.
Gradle now supports Kotlin 2.2+ and the new K2 compiler for build authoring, aligning with the latest Kotlin ecosystem developments.
The minimum required Java version has been raised to Java 17.
We’ve also removed deprecated APIs, following our deprecation policy.

The GA release is expected next month. In the meantime, test the RC, then share feedback on the issue tracker or in the Gradle Community Slack.

Gradle Build Cache Webinar

Join us for our upcoming webinar on Gradle Build Cache! Build caching and related performance gains have contributed to making Gradle Build Tool one of the most popular tools in the JVM ecosystem, and Gradle’s caching capabilities will continue to evolve this year.

Laura Kassovic and Oleg Nenashev—that’s us, the authors of this newsletter—are hosting a webinar on July 24 to show how Gradle’s build cache can help you cut down your build times by reusing task outputs from previous runs. We’ll review real-world examples from open source projects that are using a free Gradle-sponsored Develocity instance to leverage local and distributed caching. We’ll also share pointers for developers looking to level up their Gradle Build Tool skills.

Gradle 7 And 8 Patch Releases

Both Gradle 8.14.2 and 7.6.5 address improvements in dynamic version resolution, ensuring more accurate and efficient dependency management. Gradle 7.6.5 also backports key dependency updates for better compatibility and performance.

Check out the full details in the 8.14.2 and 7.6.5 release notes.

Maven Central Is Changing

Heads up: On June 30, 2025, publishing to Maven Central via the legacy OSSRH backend will break. Gradle users must migrate to updated publishing tools that support the new API.

See the Gradle Cookbook to learn more.

Upcoming Events

June 26, Software Delivery Excellence in the age of AI - Join this fireside chat with Scala creator Martin Odersky and Gradle founder Hans Dockter, as they unpack the evolving landscape of developer productivity in the age of GenAI.
July 10, Java Forum Stuttgart - Stefan Wolf will present on Developer-first Gradle.
July 24, Build Cache Webinar - Laura Kassovic and Oleg Nenashev showcase everything you need to know about the Gradle Build Cache.
August 3-10, JCrete - Oleg Nenashev will join this un-conference focused on the Java tooling ecosystem and developer productivity.
August 19-21, Scala Days - Come visit the Gradle team and hear from Gradle Senior Software Engineer Martin Duhem on “Exploring Build Caching: A Practical Overview”
September 23-24, DPE Summit by Gradle, San Francisco - Registration is open and the first round of speakers has been announced! Don’t miss your chance to attend the only conference dedicated entirely to DPE and DX.

Spread the Word

We encourage you to share highlights from this newsletter — let’s support the authors and contributors!

You can always find this and previous editions in the Gradle Newsletter Archive or subscribe via RSS.

The Call for Proposals for the July edition is now open and we’d love your contributions!

Gradle Build Tool May 2025 Newsletter

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

New Posts

Escape (de)Velocity - Artisanal Debugging of Tasks by Aurimas Liutikas
Using `immutables.org` with Gradle the Right Way by Benedikt Ritter
How I Cut My Gradle Build Time by 50% by James Cullimore
Netflix App Testing At Scale by Jose Alcérreca

New Videos

Tools and patterns for scalable Android app testing and Gradle Managed Devices by Jose Alcérreca
Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds by Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene

From the Gradle Team

Gradle Best Practices

The new Gradle Best Practices guide—a collaboration between Gradle, Google, and JetBrains—helps developers write more stable, maintainable builds. While Gradle’s flexibility is one of its greatest strengths, it can also lead to confusion, especially for new users or teams scaling their builds. This guide tackles that head-on by offering clear, opinionated guidance on how to use Gradle effectively. It’s structured around a “Do This, Not That” format, helping teams quickly adopt recommended patterns and avoid common pitfalls, with a strong focus on consistency, performance, and long-term maintainability.

The first release includes a dozen foundational best practices covering everything from dependency management to plugin configuration and build structure. But this is just the beginning. As Gradle evolves, so will the guide, with new recommendations, community input, and tooling support to surface best practices directly in your IDE. New Best Practices will be added weekly, and we’re aiming for 50+ Best Practices by Gradle 9.0. Whether you’re building Android apps, Java libraries, or custom plugins, this guide gives you a well-lit path to building with confidence.

Check out the blog post to learn more about the creation of the Gradle Best Practices guide.

Update on Gradle 9

We’re actively working toward Gradle 9, with a tentative release planned for summer 2025. We plan to have the first release candidate available for testing in early June. The milestone releases are already available, with the last milestone-9 release including the key dependency updates (Java 17, Groovy 4, Kotlin 2) and most of the deprecation removals. Thanks to everyone who shared their feedback and helped us evaluate the impact of the changes and make decisions on the next steps!

One of the decisions, based on project status and early adopter feedback, impacts Provider API migration—an effort to embrace lazy configuration, and to make APIs for Kotlin DSL and Groovy DSL consistent. We decided to exclude the Provider API migration from the 9.0 scope so that we can improve the migration user experience. Better IDE support, in particular, is essential to make this migration successful for users. This requires both enhancements within Gradle and the corresponding adoption of those changes in IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio.
We remain committed to the Provider API migration and are actively working to complete the remaining unmigrated properties. Our goal is to include it in Gradle 10, which is targeted for 2026.

Learn more about Gradle 9 on this page. Try out the release candidate and share your feedback using the issue tracker or the #releases-discussion channel on the Gradle Community Slack.

Maven Central Publishing Updates

TL;DR: On June 30, there will be a potentially breaking change in Maven Central publishing. See this page for recommendations and plugin compatibility status.

As announced by Sonatype, the Sonatype OSS Repository Hosting service (OSSRH) will reach end-of-life on June 30, 2025. OSSRH is an old and deprecated component of the Maven Central Repository service, one of the most popular repositories for publishing open source libraries and other distributables in the Java and Kotlin ecosystems. Many Gradle users publish their open source projects to Maven Central, using the wide range of plugins and tools available.

With OSSRH sunsetting, publishing to Maven Central will only be possible through a new API, which represents a complete redesign. Builds will need to be updated to continue publishing to Maven Central when the compatibility layer is removed in June 2025.

For more detailed guidelines, see this page in the Gradle Cookbook. At the moment, there are no official plugins for Gradle that can publish using the new API. Several publishing plugins from the community already declare compatibility with the new APIs. Below are examples of popular community plugins, ranked by GitHub stars:

We invite plugin maintainers to update their plugins to support the new APIs. To encourage this effort, we’ve created a new #maven-central-publishing channel on the Gradle Community Slack. We also have a Google Summer of Code project targeting a better developer experience for Maven Central Publishing.

NOTE: This announcement does not impact the Gradle Plugin Portal. We host our own repository for Gradle plugins, which is independent from Maven Central.

Welcome the Google Summer of Code 2025 contributors!

We’re excited to announce eight Googler Summer of Code (GSoC) projects in the Kotlin Foundation this year! Among these projects, there are five projects directly related to Gradle and other important components of the Kotlin Ecosystem—including Language Server Protocol for Kotlin, and integrations for Kotlin Multiplatform and Android ecosystems.

Gradle Convention Plugin for Developing Jenkins Plugins by Aarav Mahajan
Improving Configuration Cache and lock contention in key Gradle plugins by Nouran Atef
Enhanced Kotlin Code Quality Reporting with Gradle Problems API: Integration with Detekt and Ktlint by Vanessa Johnson
Maven Central publishing plugin for Gradle with new APIs by Yongjun Hong
IntelliJ Platform Gradle Plugin – Gradle Reporting and Parallel Verifications by Victoria Chuks Alajemba

If you’re interested in any of the specified projects, make sure to say hello to the contributors and join the project channels referenced from the project pages. Your feedback will benefit each project!

Upcoming Events

June 10, Paris JUG - Join Trisha Gee and Louis Jacomet for a presentation about Gradle Build Tool and Develocity.
June 17, Silicon Chalet, Switzerland - Oleg Nenashev will present on data and data providers mocking for Java and Gradle projects with the Faker library.
June 23-27, PlatformCon (Online) - Oleg Nenashev will deliver a workshop on modeling AWS service providers with Testcontainers, WireMock, and Localstack, in Java and Gradle projects.
June 24, Open Source in Finance Forum, London - Meet the Gradle team and engage with experts across financial services, technology, and open source.
June 25-26, droidcon NYC - Meet the Gradle team at our booth and stay to hear from Inaki Villar and Tom Tresansky at the “Build times breaking your flow?” session.
July 10, Java Forum Stuttgart - Stefan Wolf will present on Developer-first Gradle.
August 3-10, JCrete - Oleg Nenashev will join this unconference, which will focus on the Java tooling ecosystem and developer productivity.
September 23-24, DPE Summit by Gradle, San Francisco - Tickets are going fast! Grab your ticket now and keep an eye on our website for updates to the speaker lineup and schedule.

Spread the Word

Please help the authors and contributors of this newsletter by sharing it onward! As always, we’ve also published this newsletter in our Gradle Newsletter Archive so you can share it as a link or subscribe via RSS.

Finally, the Call for Proposals for the May newsletter edition is already open.

Gradle Build Tool April 2025 Newsletter

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Before we dive in—Are you interested in learning more about Declarative Gradle? Join Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene for a special webinar on April 24. They’ll explore common developer challenges in understanding and maintaining complex builds, and show how Declarative Gradle introduces a standardized, out-of-the-box approach to simplifying and streamlining build logic. RSVP Here.

From the Community

New Posts

Options for Options - Ways to Pass Arguments to Gradle by Aurimas Liutikas
Profile & Benchmark Android Builds. Build analyzing tools and different benchmark scenarios by Nika Chapidze
Public (API) Declaration in Gradle plugins and libraries by Aurimas Liutikas
Balancing Memory Heap and Performance in Gradle Builds by Iñaki Villar
Optimize your Gradle, Maven, sbt, and Bazel builds with resource usage data by Brian Demers
Treasure Cache - Gradle Cache Entries by Aurimas Liutikas
How to Use Composite Builds in Gradle to Work Locally with Shared Modules by Jorge Luis Castro Medina

New Videos

The Shanman Strikes Again: Gradle .kts Support in OpenRewrite with Shannon Pamperl
Supercharging Gradle with Nx by Jason Jean at Toronto JUG
Android Builds: Simple Recipes to Enhance Developer Productivity by Aida Issayeva at DPE Summit
Gradle for Maven users by Jean-Michel Fayard at Paris JUG (in French)
How to Send Java Gradle App Logs to Elastic Stack on DevOps Hint

From the Gradle Team

Gradle 8.14 Release

We expect the Gradle 8.14 release in a few days — now with Java 24 support! This release adds full compatibility with Java 24 and introduces support for GraalVM native image toolchains. It also brings enhancements to test reporting, making it easier to understand why tests were skipped. Lazy initialization of dependency configurations improves both configuration performance and memory usage. A new integrity check mode in the configuration cache also helps debug cache correctness issues more effectively.

On the build authoring side, the Problems API is expanded to support arbitrary structured data, making it easier for IDEs to consume rich diagnostics through the Tooling API, which was also extended to provide this data. See the release candidate changelog here. The final release should be live soon!

Declarative Gradle EAP 3

A few weeks ago, we announced the third Early Access Preview (EAP 3) of Declarative Gradle. This release introduces a new testing { } block, expands the Declarative Configuration Language (DCL) with support for List and File types, and brings improved IDE integration—including support in Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, and Visual Studio Code.

In EAP 3, Declarative Gradle remains experimental, but it’s ready for developers eager to explore it in simple Java, Kotlin JVM, and Android projects. While some limitations still exist, you can define your own software types or embed a DCL syntax block within Kotlin DSL build scripts. If you’re curious to try it out and share feedback, check out this blog post to get started.

If you’d like to learn more, join Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene for the “Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds” webinar on April 24, 8:00 AM PST / 17:00 CET. RSVP here.

New Gradle 101 Videos on YouTube

In addition to the full-fledged Gradle Build Tool tutorials on DPE University, we’re updating our training materials on YouTube. We’ve started a new Gradle Build Tool 101 & Tutorials playlist, and you can already find overviews for Gradle’s core features like Tasks, Build Caching, and Version Catalogs. Check it out!
To receive updates, make sure to subscribe to the channel!

Develocity 2025.1 Release

We’re excited to announce the release of Develocity 2025.1! We’ve packed this update with features to make your build and test processes even smoother. Here’s what’s new:

Faster failure fixes: Instantly pinpoint Gradle/Maven build issues.
AI-driven stability: Quickly identify and resolve build stability problems.
Deeper test insights: Gain visibility into npm (Jest) and Python (pytest) test execution.
Optimized build efficiency: Track and improve Predictive Test Selection and Test Distribution.

For a comprehensive look at everything new, check out the 2025.1 Release Notes.

DPE Summit - Call for Papers

DPE Summit is the premier event by Gradle dedicated to Developer Productivity Engineering and improving developer experience at scale. Last year’s DPE Summit featured speakers from Airbnb, Meta, Netflix, Google, and Uber. You can explore the full list of 2024 session videos and slides here.

This year’s event will take place in San Francisco on September 23-24. Tickets are already available, and we invite all Gradle users and developer productivity engineers to submit their talk ideas—the Call for Speakers is closing soon on April 27. We hope to see you there!

Upcoming Events

April 24, Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds (Online) - Webinar with Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene discussing the latest EAP 3 release and what Declarative Gradle brings to Gradle developer experience.
May 15, Gradle Configuration Cache: 2x faster, 4x smaller, and ready for Gradle 9.0 (Online) - Webinar with Rodrigo Oliveira. They will talk about the recent updates in Configuration Cache and what the Configuration team plans for Gradle 9 and beyond.
May 17, Swiss Open Education Day - Oleg Nenashev will present on mentorship programs in open source and academia, including stories from Gradle’s programs
May 21-23, Kotlinconf - Meet the Gradle Build Tool team at the Gradle and Kotlin Foundation booths! Alex Semin and Rodrigo Oliveira will also present on Fast inner dev loops for Kotlin builds with Gradle.
May 21-23, Spring I/O - Oleg Nenashev will deliver a workshop on integration testing with Gradle, Spring, Testcontainers, and WireMock.
June 10, Paris JUG - Join Trisha Gee and Louis Jacomet for a presentation about Gradle Build Tool and Develocity.
June 23-27, PlatformCon (Online) - Oleg Nenashev will deliver a workshop on modeling AWS service providers with Testcontainers, WireMock, and Localstack, in Java and Gradle projects
August 3-10, JCrete - Oleg Nenashev will join this unconference, which will focus on the Java tooling ecosystem and developer productivity.
September 23-24, DPE Summit by Gradle - Registration is now open! Grab your ticket and throw your hat in the ring to speak.

Webinar on Configuration Cache!

The Configuration Cache is one of Gradle’s most popular recent features and is set to become the preferred mode of execution in the upcoming Gradle 9.0 release. Whether you’re building Java, Kotlin, Android, or native projects, the Configuration Cache can significantly reduce configuration time—especially in large codebases. It also improves the overall developer experience, both in the IDE and when building from the command line.

In this talk, Rodrigo Oliveira will share the latest updates on the Configuration Cache, highlighting how it has evolved over the past year in terms of performance, resource efficiency, and developer experience.

You’ll learn about recent improvements—including new tooling support, integration with the Problems API, and deeper insights via Gradle Build Scan and Develocity—that make it easier than ever to adopt Configuration Cache and troubleshoot compatibility issues.

The session will include real-world metrics and examples from open-source projects that have already adopted Configuration Cache (including Gradle itself). Finally, Rodrigo will discuss what’s coming next, and how teams can prepare for Configuration Cache to be enabled by default in a future release. RSVP here

You can also join the community channels to learn more!

Spread the Word

We invite you to share news from this newsletter—Let’s help the authors and contributors! As always, this newsletter is also published in our Gradle Newsletter Archive, and you can share it as a link or subscribe via RSS.

Finally, the Call for Proposals for the May newsletter edition is already open.

Gradle Build Tool March 2025 Newsletter

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re reading this, consider joining us for a webinar on March 27! In this talk, Stefan Wolf, Principal Software Engineer at Gradle, will discuss troubleshooting local and CI builds for Gradle and Apache Maven. He’ll also show what actually happens when various build and test failures arise and the tools available for solving them rapidly. RSVP here.

From the Community

New Posts

Optimizing Gradle Build Support in nixpkgs by Benedikt Ritter
Maybe Don’t Run - Optional Tasks in Gradle by Aurimas Liutikas
Gradle Plugins Best Practices about centralizing plugin declarations, transitive and classpath dependencies by Tim Malseed
That’s Gonna Leave A Mark - Gradle Plugin Markers by Aurimas Liutikas
NixOS Meets Enterprise Java: A Cautionary Tale by Benedikt Ritter
7 Gradle Features Every Android Developer Should Master by Artem Asoyan
Great Gradle Goodies: Code Formatting with Spotless by Michael Kutz

New Videos

Gradle, The Ultimate Delegator by Tom Koptel at Android Budapest
Fighting the Elephant - Gradle Convention Plugins by Duncan McGregor
Trisha Gee’s Expert Advice for Young Developers and her Gradle Journey, at Tales from the jar side

New Releases

The Reproducible Builds Gradle plugin by GradleX is now endorsed by Reproducible Builds, a site that promotes this best software development practice.
New Garbage Collector Report Plugin by Iñaki Villar. It collects GC metrics based on the GC logs generated during the build, generates a console report, or CSV file, or submits the data to Develocity or Build Scan.

From the Gradle Team

State of the Configuration Cache - Towards Gradle 9

As Gradle 9.0 approaches, we’re sharing updates on the Configuration Cache—a key feature of the release and one that significantly improves configuration time for large projects. This release will make the Configuration Cache the preferred execution mode, with the goal of enabling it by default in Gradle 10.0. We’ve made substantial progress in 2024, with massive performance and compatibility reporting improvements. As Gradle Fellow Tony Robalik noted:

“I’m excited about all the work Gradle has done to make the Configuration Cache stable and the preferred mechanism for running builds. At work, we’ve observed that enabling Configuration Cache globally will recover roughly 4 years of lost engineering time annually. The configuration cache also lays the foundation for Isolated Projects, which has been an eagerly awaited feature since Gradle first announced it several years ago!”
- Tony Robalik, Gradle Fellow and a Senior Software Engineer at Square

Learn more in our recent blog post!

New Solution Page for Gradle Build Tool and Develocity

As you may have seen, we recently published multiple new solution pages on Gradle.com, our company website. They cover integrations between our Develocity and Build Scan services with various build tools, CI Systems, IDEs, programming languages, test frameworks, and specifications. Of course, there’s a dedicated page for Gradle Build Tool, check it out!

Monthly Gradle Build Tool Webinars

Starting in March, we’ll be hosting more frequent Gradle Build Tool webinars on Gradle’s webinar platform. We will also continue hosting community events, streaming them to social media as we have in the past. The full schedule will be published soon, and we’re excited to announce the first two webinars:

March 27 - Troubleshooting Gradle and Maven builds with Develocity with Stefan Wolf - a principal engineer working on many of Gradle’s open-source components and the lead engineer for the Build Scan integration
April 24 - Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds with Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene from the Declarative Gradle and JVM teams

See all upcoming Gradle events and webinars on our Events page!

GSoC 2025 - Contributor Applications start March 24!

As we prepare for Google Summer of Code 2025, we’re looking for potential contributors. Thanks to everyone who has already reached out to the team! The applications open on March 24, and the deadline for final applications is April 8.

Below is a list of Gradle-related project ideas that we’re excited to mentor under the Kotlin Foundation. We also welcome any new project proposals you’d like to submit:

If you’re interested in participating, join the #gsoc channels on the Gradle Community Slack and the Kotlin Foundation Slack.

Kotlin Foundation - Annual Report

The Kotlin Foundation recently published its 2024 report, which offers an overview of last year’s initiatives and milestones within the Kotlin ecosystem. The report covers Kotlin 2.0 and the K2 compiler, outreach, and grants programs, and new foundation members and committees. These efforts have continued to foster community engagement and drive the ecosystem’s growth. Gradle is happy to contribute to a number of activities, including serving on the foundation’s committees.

So what have we been up to? In 2024, we continued our membership in the Education Committee and participated in Google Summer of Code under the umbrella of the foundation. We supported Kotlin-focused events, including droidCon, user groups, and Kotlinconf. In December, we also joined the Ecosystem Committee to facilitate ecosystem partnerships with the Kotlin Foundation members and the developer community. As part of our open source support program, Gradle provides a free Develocity instance for the Kotlin project. Kotlin—along with the Kotlin compiler, Ktor, and other core projects—rely on Gradle Build Tool and Develocity for speeding up builds and tests and getting insights into failures, flaky tests, and historical performance trends

We’re proud to participate in the Kotlin Foundation and support these projects and their ongoing success. See the full report here.

Upcoming Events

March 25, DPE Tour Palo Alto—This in-person event at Meta HQ focused on Developer Productivity Engineering and Developer Experience, featuring talks from Meta, Microsoft, Uber, and Gradle (with our very own Trisha Gee).
March 27, Troubleshooting Gradle and Maven builds with Develocity (Online) - Webinar with Stefan Wolf, a principal engineer working on many of Gradle’s open source components and the lead for the Build Scan integration.
April 10-11, Android Makers by droidcon - Louis Jacomet and Paul Merlin will discuss Gradle’s scalability for Android projects. Are build times breaking your flow? Learn how to make them fast!
April 24, Declarative Gradle: A developer-first approach to Gradle builds (Online) - Webinar with Paul Merlin and Sterling Greene discussing the latest EAP 3 release and what Declarative Gradle brings to Gradle developer experience.
May 17 - Swiss Open Education Day - Oleg Nenashev will present on mentorship programs in open source and academia, including stories from Gradle’s programs
May 21-23, Kotlinconf - Meet the Gradle Build Tool team at the Gradle and Kotlin Foundation booths! Alex Semin and Rodrigo Oliveira will also present on Fast inner dev loops for Kotlin builds with Gradle.
June 23-27, PlatformCon (Online) - Oleg Nenashev will speak about using Testcontainers and API mocking for Golang projects (and yes, you can do the same with Java and Gradle!)
August 03-10, JCrete - Oleg Nenashev will attend this conference, which will focus on the Java tooling ecosystem and developer productivity.
September 23-24, DPE Summit by Gradle - Registration is now open! Grab your early-bird ticket while they last and throw your hat in the ring to speak.

Featured Event: Troubleshooting Gradle and Maven builds with Develocity

How much time do you spend each day troubleshooting your builds and tests? If you’re like most developers, you regularly see dependencies fail, infrastructure explodes, nonstop flaky tests, and Checkstyle turning into Gandalf (“you shall not pass”). That’s okay, right? At least everything works on your machine. Sarcasm aside, there are many points of failure. We need proper tools to identify and fix the root cause as quickly and easily as possible.

In this talk by Stefan Wolf, Principal Software Engineer at Gradle, we’ll take a look at troubleshooting local and CI builds for Gradle and Apache Maven. We’ll dive deep into observing what is actually happening when various build and test failures arise, and the tools at your disposal for solving them rapidly.

You can learn more about the upcoming webinar and RSVP here.

Spread the Word

Finally, the Call for Proposals for the March newsletter edition is already open.