The Gradle Newsletter

Gradle Build Tool June 2026 Newsletter

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the June 2026 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! This month, we’re untangling the four Kotlin versions hiding in your Gradle build, unpacking Gradle 9.6.0, and exploring how Netflix runs 358 architectural rules across 5,000+ repositories with Nebula ArchRules.

From the Community

ANDROID GRADLE PLUGIN 9.3.0

AGP 9.3.0 shipped this month, supporting up to API level 37 and continuing the AGP release cadence that has closely tracked the Gradle 9.x line. If you’re on AGP 9.2.x and Gradle 9.5.x, this upgrade pairs cleanly.

👉 See the release notes

SCALING ARCHUNIT

John Burns and Emily Yuan from Netflix’s JVM Ecosystem team detail how they turned ArchUnit (normally a per-repo, JUnit-based architectural-rules tool) into a cross-repo enforcement layer for Netflix’s large fleet of Java repositories.

Two new Gradle plugins do the work: an ArchRules Library Plugin for authoring and publishing rules, and an ArchRules Runner Plugin that automatically picks up bundled rules from dependencies. The system runs 358 rules across 5,000+ repositories, detecting nearly 1 million issues (~1,000 of them high-priority), and ships with OSS rule libraries for nullability, Gradle plugin best practices, deprecated Joda/Guava usage, and known-vulnerable APIs.

👉 Read the post

MEET TONY ROBALIK

Tony Robalik (@autonomousapps) is a Gradle Fellow and the solo engineer behind a quietly foundational set of JVM build tools worth knowing about: the Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin for catching unused and misclassified dependencies, the Gradle Best Practices Plugin for plugin-author anti-patterns, the Gradle Dependencies Sorter, and the community-reference Gradle Glossary. If you build with Gradle at scale, at least one or two of these tools will likely look familiar. Tony now consults independently under Faster Builds, LLC.

👉 Find him on GitHub

BEST PRACTICES FOR DEPENDENCY VERIFICATION

Benedikt Ritter distills a year of running Gradle dependency verification across the GradleX projects. Key recommendations: prefer PGP keys over per-artifact checksums, use the armored keyring so diffs are reviewable, disable key-server lookups, annotate the file with confidence indicators, and make dependency resolution reproducible.

👉 Read the post

From Gradle

GRADLE 9.6.0

Gradle 9.6.0 is out! This release includes:

Configuration Cache hit rates improved: Gradle now precisely tracks which org.gradle.project.* system properties and ORG_GRADLE_PROJECT_* environment variables are actually read during the configuration phase, so changing an unused property no longer invalidates the cache.
Deprecation of implicit lookup in parent projects: implicit property references and explicit findProperty() / property() / hasProperty() calls now emit deprecation warnings when they resolve from parent projects.
Cloud-runner I/O performance: Significant performance gains on cloud CI runners.

Update your wrapper to get started: ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=9.6.0 --gradle-distribution-sha256-sum=bbaeb2fef8710818cf0e261201dab964c572f92b942812df0c3620d62a529a01 && ./gradlew wrapper

👉 See the release notes

4 VERSIONS OF KOTLIN?

Laura Kassovic untangles what’s actually happening when you “set the Kotlin version” in a Gradle build: two compilers, your Kotlin Gradle Plugin and the one Gradle embeds for build logic, each with its own language-version dial, gives you four numbers to keep straight. Gradle 9.6.0 ships embedded Kotlin 2.3.21 pinned to language version 2.2, while your KGP and its language version are yours to set.

The post explains why the separation is deliberate, where the two can safely diverge, and what to expect when you bump the Gradle wrapper.

👉 Read the post

From Develocity

ARTIFACT CACHE ♥️ ARTIFACTORY

The Develocity Team’s case for treating the CI pipeline as the new GenAI-era bottleneck, backed by concrete numbers. Sonatype reports 83% of Maven Central’s bandwidth flows to just 1% of IPs, one financial institution moves 23 TiB of artifacts in a single day across ~50,000 builds, and Develocity’s projection for a 20,000-developer org is roughly $7M/year in operating savings plus $5M in deferred CapEx.

The recommendation isn’t to rip out Artifactory; it’s to keep it as the system of record and add Develocity Artifact Cache as a build-artifact CDN, with Edge nodes peering at the LAN/AZ level so 95%+ of artifact fetches stay local. A benchmark showed an AndroidX build time dropping from ~50 minutes to 6 minutes.

👉 Read the post

SUPPLY CHAIN OBSERVABILITY

Bryan Kelly applies the production-observability lens to the software supply chain: stop stitching SBOMs, scanners, and build logs together by hand, start treating each commit, build, scan, and deployment as a signed, queryable fact. Provenance Governor binds Build Scan data, identity claims, and policy results into a triangle of trust — the “what” from Develocity, the “who” from short-lived workload identities, and the “authority” from Provenance Governor itself.

👉 Read the post

Upcoming events

Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you to discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE), or AI’s evolving impact on software development and delivery.

October 5–9 — Devoxx Belgium 2026 — Antwerp, Belgium. The original Devoxx — five days, the largest JVM developer conference in Europe. Worth marking the calendar now; tickets and CFP move fast.
September 2–3 — Javazone 2026 — Lillestrøm, Norway. The biggest community-driven Java conference. Organized by JavaBin and the Norwegian Java User Group.

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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!

Gradle Build Tool May 2026 Newsletter

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the May 2026 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! This month, we’re diving into the future of fast inner dev loops with Configuration Cache and Isolated Projects, a 57% CI build-time win from DuckDuckGo, a Gradle 9.5.1 patch release, and a hands-on look at what happens when you point an LLM at a real Gradle plugin codebase.

From the Community

DO LLMS SUCK AT CODING?

Tony Robalik documents three concrete incidents on his Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin where LLM-using contributors caused real damage: an AI-generated ClassCastException misdiagnosis that got nearly every claim wrong, a “fix” PR that was semantically incorrect and twice the size needed, and a path-sensitivity PR that would have caused stochastic build failures for every remote-cache user.

His response: a Strict No LLM / No AI Policy added to the plugin’s Code of Conduct.

👉 Read the post

KOTLIN SCOPE REAP

A kotlin { ... } block nested inside android { buildTypes { release { ... } } } looks like it scopes -Werror to release builds, but kotlin is a top-level extension, so Gradle quietly applies it to every Kotlin compile task in the project.

Aurimas Liutikas walks through this footgun and how Gradle resolves names by walking up nested blocks, parent projects, and layered gradle.properties until it finds a match.

👉 Read the post

WHY RICH CONSOLE FAILS ON NIX

Benedikt Ritter traces a year-old “Gradle 8.12 broke rich console on NixOS” report to two unrelated upstream design choices that silently compose: native-platform’s .so cache keys only on NativeVersion.VERSION (so patched and bare upstream libs collide), and nixpkgs-built JDKs can’t dlopen libraries from /lib64 even on FHS hosts like Fedora-with-Nix.

Workaround in the meantime: pin org.gradle.console=rich in ~/.gradle/gradle.properties to bypass auto-detection entirely.

👉 Read the post

REFACTORING HCL W/ OPENREWRITE

Paweł Oczadły makes the case for treating org-wide Terraform/OpenTofu migrations as a structured refactoring problem instead of a sed-script problem: OpenRewrite’s lossless semantic trees do the rewriting, Gradle is the execution engine, and responsibilities split cleanly into Java recipes (the how), YAML recipes (the what), and Gradle (orchestration).

Two Azure Verified Modules case studies show the pattern landing as clean, review-ready PRs rather than ad-hoc scripts. Develocity Build Scans get a brief nod as the natural observability layer if you already use it.

👉 Read the post

From Gradle

GRADLE 9.5.1 RELEASE

Gradle 9.5.1 is the first patch release for 9.5.0, fixing three regressions that hit some users on the original 9.5.0:

OOM when upgrading from 9.4.1 to 9.5.0 (#37753)
Tooling API can’t be used with a relative project directory in 9.5.0 (#37797)
Missing docs for CreateMD5.java (#37812)

If you’ve moved to 9.5.0, the upgrade is recommended:

./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-version=9.5.1 --gradle-distribution-sha256-sum=bafc141b619ad6350fd975fc903156dd5c151998cc8b058e8c1044ab5f7b031f && ./gradlew :wrapper

👉 See the release notes

FAST INNER DEV LOOPS

Alex Semin lays out Gradle’s plan for closing the configuration-phase bottleneck on large projects, and why Configuration Cache is set to become the default in Gradle 10. The bottleneck has shifted from execution to configuration on large projects, and Configuration Cache, plus the experimental Isolated Projects feature, directly attack it:

Configuration Cache treats configuration as a pure function and caches the resulting work graph. Block reportedly saves ~4 years of engineering time annually after adoption.
Isolated Projects adds boundaries between subprojects so configuration can run in parallel, and per-project caching can kick in on cache misses. Benchmarks show 1.3x–2.5x speedups in Android Studio sync for 50–100-subproject builds.
NowInAndroid is now Isolated Projects–compatible, a useful proof point that the migration is feasible for real Android codebases.

The post also embeds the original KotlinConf 2025 recording if you’d rather watch.

👉 Read the post

From Develocity

DUCKDUCKGO CUTS BUILD TIME BY 57%

In a new case study published this month, DuckDuckGo’s Android team detailed how they used Develocity Build Validation Scripts to systematically hunt down cache misses in a 160-module Android build. The validation scripts surfaced three specific classes of cache-poisoning issues: Room schema path differences, Dagger non-determinism, and CMake caching mismatches. Fixing them cut CI build times by up to 57%.

👉 Read the post

Upcoming events

June 3–4 — jPrime 2026 — Sofia, Bulgaria. Bulgarian JVM conference with a strong track on build tooling and platform engineering.
June 3–4 — DevTalks Bucharest — Bucharest, Romania. Broad developer conference with an active JVM/Android stream.
June 17–19 — Devoxx Poland 2026 — Kraków, Poland. Seven-track Java/JVM conference; expect strong Kotlin and build-tooling content.

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

Gradle Build Tool April 2026 Newsletter

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

INTELLIJ IDEA 2026.1 RELEASE

JetBrains shipped IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1, and this release has more for Gradle users than usual. The official Gradle Best Practices guide is now baked into the IDE as inspections and quick-fixes.

The guide is part of the JetBrains × Google × Gradle collaboration, and it’s now integrated into the editor. More than 30 practices have been authored to date, with the first batch live in 2026.1 and the rest landing in subsequent updates. Expect your IDE to start gently nudging you in the right direction.

👉 Watch the video

From Gradle

GRADLE 9.5.0 RELEASE

Gradle 9.5.0 is out! This release includes:

Task provenance in error messages and reports: when a task fails, Gradle now tells you whether it was registered by a build script, a settings script, or a plugin, making it much easier to track down the source.
Type-safe Kotlin accessors for precompiled Settings convention plugin: *.settings.gradle.kts convention plugins now get the same IDE autocompletion and compile-time checking as Project-level conventions when the kotlin-dsl plugin is applied.
Wrapper download retries: opt-in retries and retryBackOffMs properties in gradle-wrapper.properties reduce flaky CI failures on unstable networks.

Update your wrapper to get started:

./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-version=9.5.0

👉 See the release notes

GITHUB ACTIONS FOR GRADLE v6

Version 6 of gradle/actions is out! The GitHub Actions toolkit is used by over 45,000 open-source repositories and featured in GitHub’s official Java starter workflows. Here’s what’s new and what it means for your CI.

Two caching paths, one action. Pick the path that fits:

Basic Caching (new in v6.1.0, MIT-licensed): a fully open-source provider built on @actions/cache. Caches Gradle build files and outputs, derives cache keys from your build files, and wipes the cache cleanly when those files change; no stale restore keys piling up.
Enhanced Caching (default): the proprietary gradle-actions-caching component, where the team is investing in future capabilities like production-ready Configuration Cache support and smarter Gradle User Home cleanup. Free forever for public repositories, currently in Free Preview for private ones.

Opt into Basic Caching with one line:

- uses: gradle/actions/setup-gradle@v6
  with:
    cache-provider: basic

👉 Read the blog post

NEW COURSE: DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT 1

Dependency management is one of the topics the Gradle community asks about most, and the one where small misunderstandings compound into the most painful build problems down the line.

The Gradle team has published “Dependency Management 1: Configurations” on DPE University. A free, self-paced course that starts from first principles: what a Dependency Configuration actually is, how declarable and resolvable configurations differ, and why the distinction matters when you’re authoring libraries or debugging a dependency graph.

👉 Watch on YouTube

From Develocity

DEVELOCITY 2026.1 RELEASE

Develocity 2026.1 was released on March 25, with four headline themes:

Develocity as a managed service: Gradle Technologies now offers a fully operated Develocity instance, removing the infrastructure, upgrade, and maintenance burden from your platform team.
Enhanced MCP capabilities: skills and guided workflows on top of the Develocity MCP server encode years of build-engineering domain expertise, making root-cause and performance analysis reliable for both AI agents and human developers.
Predictable ephemeral-CI startup with automated cache management: the Artifact Cache CLI tool is smaller, intelligently removes stale content from images, and can now be pointed directly at a known Edge node without first contacting the Develocity server.
AI-Powered visual supply chain analysis: stop sifting through logs and static reports, and instead, instantly visualize dependency impact, vulnerability exposure, and compliance status across your entire artifact landscape.

The combination of Gradle 9.5.0 and Develocity plugin 4.4+ lets you publish Build Scans to your Develocity server by simply setting the COM_GRADLE_DEVELOCITY_URL environment variable; no need to modify the project or apply the plugin, making rollout across teams and CI pipelines effortless.

👉 Check out the release

Upcoming events

May 20–22 - KotlinConf 2026 – The official JetBrains conference devoted to the Kotlin programming language.

Spread the word

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

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

Gradle Build Tool March 2026 Newsletter

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From the Community

Peek Under the Hood — Aurimas Liutikas explores Gradle’s internal tracing feature to find build bottlenecks
Java 26 Release - HTTP/3 support, AOT object caching, and removal of the ancient Java Applet API
AGP Plugin Status - 3rd-party plugin tracker for compatibility with Gradle Isolated Projects
AGP 9.1.0 Release - Supports API 36.1, and R8 now repackages classes into the default package by default

From Gradle

Gradle 9.4.1 Release

Gradle 9.4.1 is out! This release includes several patches plus focuses on better visibility with cleaner console output, improved test reports, and Java 26 support to keep up with the ecosystem.

Update your wrapper to get started:

./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-version=9.4.1

👉 See the release notes

AI-ready Doc Guidelines

Want to contribute to Gradle’s documentation using AI? Now you can do it right. Gradle has published documentation guidelines designed to be fed directly to your AI assistant, giving it the context it needs to generate doc contributions that match Gradle’s standards and structure, ready to be turned into a pull request.

Feed it to your AI of choice, describe the change you want to make, and get output that’s already formatted correctly and ready for review.

👉 Read the guidelines

Gradle Profiler Release

The Gradle Profiler is a tool for profiling and benchmarking Gradle builds, helping you identify and measure performance bottlenecks. A new release makes it well worth upgrading: it now requires Java 17, integrates with the latest async-profiler, and can produce Perfetto traces without any external tools installed.

Pair it with the tracing post from the community section above for a powerful performance investigation setup.

👉 See the release notes

Gradle Publishing Plugin Release

The Gradle Plugin Publishing Plugin has a new release. Starting with 2.1.0, you can declare your plugin’s compatibility with Gradle features — Configuration Cache support is the first, with more to follow.

Plugins marked as Configuration Cache-compatible will be promoted in the Plugin Portal search results, helping the community make faster adoption decisions.

👉 Upgrade now

Avoid a Supply Chain Disaster

Locking your dependencies is a good start, but it’s not enough on its own. A new technical deep-dive explores Dependency Drift: how vulnerabilities can slip through even when versions are pinned, and how GitHub and Develocity’s Provenance Governor can block untrusted artifacts before they ever enter your local build cache.

With supply chain attacks on the rise, this is required reading for any team running builds in GitHub’s CI.

👉 Read more

From Develocity

Build is a process, not an action

Most teams treat their build as a black box; it either passes or fails. In a new post, David Wang argues that this binary view creates a critical observability gap, hiding the real causes of slow builds, cache misses, and redundant work behind unstructured logs.

The fix is treating the build as an observable process: capturing structured execution data across the delivery pipeline so teams and AI agents can reason about root causes rather than guess from symptoms.

👉 Read the post

From 8-hour builds to 2-hour builds

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” This was true for CI build and test times for the popular OSS streaming platform, Apache Kafka. This very lack of observability finally led the project committers to hit their breaking point.

In 2025, Kafka underwent a major overhaul, moving from a nearly defunct 8-hour build cycle to evergreen 2-hour builds, thanks to deep build insights and acceleration features from Develocity, combined with a modernized CI pipeline on GitHub Actions.

👉 Watch the video

Upcoming events

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 April edition is now open!

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!