Build Automation with Gradle
What is Build Automation
Software developers working on large, collaborative applications need to be thoughtful about how they make changes to the code. Even small adjustment can have unforeseen consequences, so teams have developed tools and practices that minimize the chance of a software product that aims to be continuously developed and improved from going offline when a change is pushed. One step in the DevOps cycle where automation can be extremely helpful is the build phase, where all the code is compiled, dependent libraries are downloaded and linked to the project, tests are performed, and an executable is produced.
For example, say you have a web app that uses many dependencies. Suppose you have to build your project manually. In that case, you must ensure that every URL is correct, that all the dependencies are downloaded, and that all the transitive dependencies are downloaded correctly. Not only is this time-consuming, but the URL and versions of these resources change over time. If we had a way to automate locating, downloading, and linking dependencies, we would get closer to a continuous development/integration workflow. This is achieved with build automation — tools that allow developers to automatically build source code into an executable state and push the build to a central repository or other production environments while performing tests to ensure the new build functions as expected.
In this article, we will look at one build automation tool, Gradle, and examine how it works and its advantages. Finally, I will discuss a customer story with Gradle.
Gradle
Gradle is an open-source dependency management and build automation tool that supports software development in multiple languages, including Java, C/C++, and Javascript. Gradle allows developers to automate tasks in the development process like compilation, packaging, testing, deployment, and publishing.
The basic way that Gradle works is by organizing your build into one or more projects. For example, a project can be an entire Web App or a single library JAR. Gradle performs work on the projects as tasks — this could be compiling some classes, generating documentation, or sending logging data to a repository, for example. Notice that Gradle can do more than just build projects! Typically, tasks are not implemented yourself but rather provided by using plugins.
The build tasks for a project are defined in the build.gradle file. The build script in Gradle is code — Gradle has its own Domain Specific Language (DSL) based on Groovy that is used to define tasks. (For comparison, popular alternative tools like ANT and Maven use forms of XML files to define builds, not programs).
The build.gradle script provides Gradle with everything it needs to run the configuration tasks defined inside the plugins, group, version, repositories, dependencies, and test code blocks.
You can then create the build with the gradle command or specify the tasks you want to perform, such as gradle test or gradle build. Gradle automates managing the dependencies, creating the executables, and even running tests for you, supporting Continuous Integration.
Benefits of Gradle
The main benefit of Gradle is its flexibility. Because it uses a DSL and has high customizability, Gradle can be used in almost any software ecosystem and even automatically supports multi-language projects. It also has the edge over competitor tools Maven and ANT by avoiding the strict rigidity of Maven’s convention-centered philosophy without requiring developers to write all the commands themselves as ANT does.
Additionally, Gradle is relatively easy to use and become familiar with and runs extremely fast.
Customer Story: PicPay
PicPay is a Brazilian mobile payment platform with III users. The company was waiting too long for Android build and test feedback. By switching to Gradle’s Build Cache and Build Scan — Gradle’s feedback and failure troubleshooting services, respectively — they drastically cut down on long build and test feedback cycle times and more easily determine and debug the root cause of build, test, and CI failures. Read more here.
Conclusion
Build automation tools are vital to software development today, as they make it easy to automatically manage dependencies, compile executables, test code, and push to production. To work in a CI/CD context, developers should be familiar with tools such as Gradle and how they can use them to benefit development.
