Gradle is a dependency management / build tool that combines the best of Maven and Ant, making it an extremely powerful and customizable tool. It also uses a sleek Groovy DSL instead of the XML approach of Maven and Ant and is my personal tool-of-choice when I start a new project. Here’s how to install. I’ll write a future post to get us started with some Gradle projects.
1. Install Java
First you need to have the Java JDK (Java Development Kit) installed; having the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) is not enough. To check if you have the JDK installed, open a command prompt or terminal and type javac -version. If you have a JDK
installed, you will see your javac version output, eg. javac 1.7.0_01. If you get an error that javac is not a recognized command, download and install the Java JDK.
2. Download Gradle
3. Unpack and Set System variables
Windows
- Unzip the Gradle download to the folder to which you would like to install Gradle, eg. “C:\Program Files”. The subdirectory gradle-x.x will be created from the archive, where x.x is the version.
- Add location of your Gradle “bin” folder to your path. Open the system properties (WinKey + Pause), select the “Advanced” tab, and the “Environment Variables” button, then add “C:\Program Files\gradle-x.x\bin” (or wherever you unzipped Gradle) to the end of your “Path” variable under System Properties. Be sure to omit any quotation marks around the path even if it contains spaces. Also make sure you separated from previous PATH entries with a semicolon “;”.
- In the same dialog, make sure that JAVA_HOME exists in your user variables or in the system variables and it is set to the location of your JDK, e.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_06 and that %JAVA_HOME%\bin is in your Path environment variable.
- Open a new command prompt (type cmd in Start menu) and run gradle –version to verify that it is correctly installed.
Mac/Linux
- Extract the distribution archive, i.e. gradle-x.x-bin.tar.gz to the directory you wish to install Gradle. These instructions assume you chose /usr/local/gradle. The subdirectory gradle-x.x will be created from the archive.
- In a command terminal, add Gradle to your PATH variable:
export PATH=/usr/local/gradle/gradle-x.x/bin:$PATH - Make sure that JAVA_HOME is set to the location of your JDK, e.g. export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.7.0_06 and that $JAVA_HOME/bin is in your PATH environment variable.
- Run gradle –version to verify that it is correctly installed.
You now have Gradle set up! Stay tuned for another post on how to build a simple Gradle project.
More reading:
And then, enable the wrapper so the others devs don’t have to install it ;)
Good point! I’ll write another post about the wrapper :)
How do you enable the wrapper? Why do you need the gradle wrapper enable? What does it do?
If you’re on Mac/linux, you can simply install GVM. It downloads, unpacks, and sets up your environment for you. (And makes it easier to change the version of grails/gradle you’re using, to boot) http://gvmtool.net/
tank you a lot !!!
:-*
Those Linux instructions will work… right up to the moment you open another command terminal, or reboot the machine, or do anything that relies on the PATH variable outside that command window or any of its subprocesses. It would be better if the instructions told how to persist the PATH across boots, and warned that once done a reboot (or logout/login, depending on how you persisted PATH) is necessary for all command terminals and processes on the machine to pick up the change to PATH. You could just assume that anyone using Linux is going to know all this already,… Read more »
Thank you for the directions, however… I don’t get it. I downloaded the complete package, and now I have no idea what to do with it on a Mac. I’m just learning APIs, and wanted to try some things with Google Calendar’s API. I don’t know Bash commands (DOS commands almost work lol…), I don’t know how to move Gradle from where it was downloaded to where it should go. Would be super nice (and probably super easy) if it just had some kind of executable that installed it in the proper location. When I run the Gradle executable, it… Read more »
I downloaded the complete package, and now I have no idea what to do with it on a Mac. I’m just learning APIs, and wanted to try some things with Google Calendar’s API. I don’t know Bash commands (DOS commands almost work lol…), I don’t know how to move Gradle from where it was downloaded to where it should go. Would be super nice (and probably super easy) if it just had some kind of executable that installed it in the proper location. When I run the Gradle executable, it looks like it’s doing…. something? Whatever it’s doing, it’s not… Read more »