From the Community

New Posts

• Groovy Who? Exploring Declarative Gradle by Aurimas Liutikas
• Google Summer of Code 2024 – Adding Android Support to the Gradle Build Server by Tanish Ranjan
• Trust But Verify - Enabling Gradle Signature Verification for An Android Project by Aurimas Liutikas
• What The Distribution - What Is Inside Gradle Distribution Zips? by Aurimas Liutikas
• Gradle Extensions Part 2: Now with Shenanigans by Tony Robalik
• Wrapping Elephants in Snowflakes and Fixing Missing libudev Warnings from Gradle on NixOS about using Gradle with Nix and NixOS, by Benedikt Ritter

New Videos

• The Ultimate Gradle Kotlin Beginner’s Crash Course for 2025 by Philipp Lackner
• How to Use GitHub Actions to Build Gradle Projects by hUndefined
• Automatic Android app versioning using git commit count with Gradle, ValueSource, and Gitlab
• Walk the OpenAPI Talk, Moonwalk the Developer Experience, and OpenAPI in Gradle, by Oleg Nenashev
• Build and CI Observability for Open Source Communities by Etienne Studer
• Leveraging the Android Gradle Plugin for Efficient Creation of 500+ White Label Apps by Tom Koptel

New Releases

• The Ysb33r Software Foundation team has released a set of plugins for orchestrating build tools in pipelines. This includes new releases for the JavaScript, GNU Make, Doxygen, GradleTest, IvyPot, and Simplified JRuby plugins, as well as the utility Cloud CI, Operating System, and Grolifant plugins - Announcement.
• The GradleX team released Maven Plugin Development Plugin v1.0 for developing Maven plugins with Gradle - Announcement.
• Shadow Plugin has been rewritten entirely in Kotlin, marking a full migration of its codebase in the upcoming 9.0 release. You can explore and try out the beta version—feedback from the community is encouraged to further improve the plugin!

From the Gradle Team

Gradle Build Tool 8.12 and 8.12.1

On December 19, we released Gradle Build Tool 8.12. This release improves error and warning reporting by summarizing duplicate entries in the Problems HTML Report. Artifact Transform ambiguity reports now include more comprehensive, actionable information. The release also introduces platform enhancements, including file-system watching support on the Alpine Linux distribution and support for building and testing Swift 6 applications.

On January 23, we also shipped the patch release with several bug fixes, including build failures on MacOS and Linux in certain scenarios. We recommend users upgrade to 8.12.1 instead of 8.12.

To learn more, see the 8.12.1 changelog.

Develocity Plugin for Gradle v. 3.19

In December 2024, the Develocity Team released version 3.19 of the Develocity Plugin for Gradle as a part of the Develocity 2024.3 release. It introduces expanded support for Build Scan and system resource usage reporting. Additionally, it includes Edge discovery based on a Develocity user’s location preference in Build Cache. For users of Gradle’s Isolated Projects feature, a reworked performance configuration page is now available. We also released Develocity 2024.3.2, which squashed a couple of bugs.

Upgrade Develocity Plugin for Gradle to version 3.19 to take advantage of these new features in your Develocity setup or directly on scans.gradle.com. See the v3.19 Release Notes for more information.

10 Years of Android Studio

Last month, Android Studio reached a big milestone: it’s been 10 years since the Android Studio 1.0 release 🎉 The IDE provides millions of developers with an integrated environment to develop, test, debug, and package Android apps. Gradle Build Tool is an instrumental part of this ecosystem.

Hans Dockter, creator of Gradle Build Tool and CEO/Founder of Gradle Inc., commented on this exciting milestone “Android Studio’s 10th anniversary marks a decade of incredible progress for Android developers. We are proud that Gradle Build Tool has continued to be a foundational part of the Android toolchain, enabling millions of Android developers to build their apps faster, more elegantly, and at scale.”

Learn more in this blog post by Google, and happy anniversary to Android Studio!

Update on Kotlin Foundation Participation

At Gradle, we continue to invest in Kotlin build tooling and developer productivity to ensure the best possible developer experience with Gradle for Kotlin, KMP, and Android projects. Kotlin has been the default language for new Gradle builds since 2023 (announcement here). As a part of our continued support for the Kotlin ecosystem, Gradle is a silver member of the Kotlin Foundation with members in multiple committees. In December, Gradle also joined the Kotlin Ecosystem Committee.

Additionally, as part of our open-source support program, Gradle provides a 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 gaining insights into failures, flaky tests, and performance trends. We’re proud to support these projects and invest in their ongoing success!

Learn more about Gradle and Kotlin here. If you’re on the Kotlin Slack, share feedback with us in the #gradle channel!

Gradle in Google Summer of Code 2025

We’re excited to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 and are currently seeking mentors and project ideas.

As in previous years, we’ll collaborate with the Kotlin Foundation rather than hosting a separate mentoring organization. Our goal is to support 1–2 projects that improve the Gradle developer experience, including plugins, developer tools, and IDE integrations. Each project will have a group of mentors dedicating a few hours per week to guide full-time or part-time contributors over a 3-month period.

If you’re interested in participating, join the #gsoc channel on the Gradle Community Slack. You can explore examples of 2024 project ideas here.

Spread the Word

The Call for Proposals for the February edition is already open! Any contributions are appreciated.