Introduction

Welcome to the November 2021 Gradle Build Tool newsletter.

This edition covers the community news and new releases of Gradle, Gradle GitHub Action 2.0, and Kotlin.

From the Community

Blog Posts

• Gradle JVM Toolchain Support in the Kotlin Plugin (from JetBrains) - discusses the support for JVM toolchain in the Kotlin plugin
• Herding Elephants: Wrangling a 3,500-module Gradle Project - shares how Square modernized the build of their massive Android project
• Hello, My Gradle Builds Are Slow! - shares a story of how AndroidX team at Google used build scans to identify and fix a major bottleneck in their build
• A Gradle Quickie: Properly Using DependsOn - recommends using implicit task dependencies and explains why
• How We Reduced Our Gradle Build Times by Over 80% - shares tips to improve performance of Gradle builds
• Fairly Evaluating the Impact of Different Android UI Libraries on Gradle Build - evaluates Jetpack Compose against the other Android UI libraries in regards to their impact on Gradle build times
• Use Kotlin 1.5 in Your Gradle Plugins - discusses various solutions to using a version of Kotlin in Gradle plugins that is newer than the version that Gradle ships with
• Send Scheduled Gradle Dependency Update Report Emails With Github Actions - describes how to set up automated notifications about new dependency versions with GitHub Actions and gradle-versions-plugin

Videos

• New videos from the Understanding Gradle series about capability conflicts and publishing libraries
• What’s New in Gradle 7.3? - discusses new features in Gradle 7.3
• How to Run Integration Tests in Gradle - discusses the plugins to easily set up integration tests, including the new The JVM Test Suite Plugin in Gradle 7.3

Plugins

• The new Included Git Repositories Plugin for including Git repositories as source dependencies in Gradle builds. See also the blog post that announces it.

Other

• Gradle Glossary - defines various Gradle terms

From Gradle Team

Automatic Feedback on Plugin Publication

The newly introduced automated approval checks provide faster feedback for plugin authors publishing their plugins to the Plugin Portal with less risk of human errors. See Automatic Feedback on Plugin Publication blog post for more details.

Gradle Releases

Gradle 7.3

Gradle 7.3 has been released. It brings declarative test suites in JVM projects so that you can conveniently define groups of tests such as unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests. The file system watching performance optimization is now more robust and automatically verifies the reliability of the underlying file system events. This release also adds support for running on and building with Java 17. See the release notes for more details and full list of improvements.

Gradle GitHub Action 2.0

The new major version of the GitHub Action for Gradle brings significant performance and usability improvements. See the release notes for details.

We recommend our official GitHub action as the best way to invoke Gradle from a GitHub actions workflow, as it offers several benefits over invoking Gradle directly.

Other Releases

Kotlin 1.6

Kotlin 1.6.0 has been released. It introduces Kover, a new Gradle plugin that measures code coverage for Kotlin code. See the blog post for details.

However, in case you use compiler plugins, we recommend postponing the upgrade until the newly introduced incremental compilation issue is fixed in an upcoming patch release.

Careers

If you share our passion for developer productivity and tooling, consider joining our globally distributed team and check out our job openings at gradle.com/careers. We are looking for new teammates including software engineers, solutions engineers, data scientist, application security engineer, developer advocates and developer productivity engineer.

If you are interested in IDE integration, see also our new job posting for IDE Integration Engineer.