Introduction

This month’s newsletter brings exciting updates across the Gradle ecosystem—including new Best Practices guidance, the latest on the Gradle 9 release, and important changes to Maven Central publishing coming this June. We’re also celebrating our 2025 Google Summer of Code contributors and highlighting great posts and videos from the community.

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:

• vanniktech/gradle-maven-publish-plugin
• JReleaser
• GradleUp/nmcp

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

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).

• 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.