Introduction

Welcome to the February Newsletter!

In this issue, we’ll cover just-released Gradle 4.6 and Gradle Enterprise 2018.1, then deep dive into using the build cache with Kotlin projects.

From the community

We ❤️ you Gradle community! Thank you for your blog posts and contributions!

• Reproducible Builds in Java — In this post, Maria Camenzuli demonstrates the value of reproducible builds, and explains how to make your Java build reproducible using Gradle.
• Renaming Your Gradle Build Files — Philippe Breault proposes a naming convention for .gradle scripts that makes it obvious which subproject each one configures.
• Dockerizing a Spring Boot application and Integration testing using containers — 2 great blog posts about using Docker with Gradle, by Ben Muschko.
• Setting Up a Microservices Architecture with Spring Boot and Gradle — Akash Bhingole explains and codifies microservices architecture through an example using Spring Boot and Gradle.
• Kotlin + buildSrc for Better Gradle Dependency Management — In this article, Sam Edwards achieves IDE completion for a set of dependencies by declaring Kotlin constants under buildSrc — very clever.

Have a blog post or plugin you’d like to see featured here? Just send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Gradle 4.6

Gradle 4.6 is a big release.

• JUnit Platform (aka JUnit 5) Support
• --fail-fast for Test tasks
• Custom command-line flags for custom tasks
• Experimental BOM and optional dependencies support
• Customizable metadata file resolution
• Improved Visual Studio support for multi-project builds
• Kotlin DSL support for init scripts

There is more. We could scarcely fit the highlights into this 53-second video; better to check the Gradle 4.6 release notes.

Gradle Enterprise 2018.1

Gradle Enterprise 2018.1 features seamless support for composite builds, a powerful mechanism for combining or splitting Gradle builds.

When using build scan plugin 0.12.1+, you will see:

• Included builds in the project view
• Tasks from included builds in the tasks view
• Which dependencies were substituted by an included build

More details are available in the release notes.

Kotlin Build Caching

Kotlin 1.2.21 provides support for Gradle’s build cache. You can enable the build cache for your Kotlin projects by following this blog post.

Build caching is particularly effective when a CI instance populates a shared, remote build cache. Community members have written 2 tutorials for doing just that:

• Speed up your Build with Gradle Remote Build Cache
• Using Gradle Build Cache Server

Upcoming online training

• Mar 13-14: Introduction to Gradle
• Apr 17-20: Advanced Gradle Fundamentals for Java/JVM
• Anytime: Maximizing Developer Productivity with Gradle Enterprise

Until next time!

—The Gradle Build Tool Team