The simplest guide to understanding Gradle!

Gradle- how often do we neglect this amazing build system and treat it as a black box, blindly copy pasting code into it! While that, without a doubt, is so very convenient (hail Stack Overflow!) , it wouldn’t hurt to know what goes on behind the hood, now would it?!

In this article, we’ll be talking about

• Types of Gradle scripts: build.gradle, settings.gradle and gradle.properties
• Structure of gradle files
• api vs implementation

So let’s get started…

Or wait..

Before we talk about the structure and types of Gradle files, let’s first touch base with the language it uses. Nothing fancy, I promise, but totally worth your time!

ENTER GROOVY!

Gradle build scripts are written in Groovy: a JVM language similar to Java but with a more concise syntax.

Here is all you need to know about Groovy to understand what’s going on:

1. Valid Java is Valid groovy.