A deep dive into an initial Kotlin build.gradle.kts

An introduction to plugins, repositories & dependencies with side-notes on BOMs, the JetBrains namespace, why `java-library` is (almost) redundant & why JCenter is dangerous

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This is the third article in a series about building a Kotlin project with Gradle configured using the Kotlin DSL. In the previous one, we talked about installing Gradle and running gradle init for the first time. We briefly described the files and folders that Gradle generates, except for the most interesting one, build.gradle.kts. If you didn’t follow the article, you can take a look at the source code here.

In this article, I want to focus exclusively on the contents of build.gradle.kts.