Gradle Tips and Trick #1

Alright, folks, I want to share some Gradle tips and tricks that might already be documented on their official documentation. But you know, who reads the documentation right? 🙃

This will be a series, so stay tuned.

Max Worker

You probably already noticed when Gradle execute their tasks, they execute it parallelly. You might want to turn it off with --no-parallel flag, but how about you just want to reduce your workers?

--max-workers flag comes to save you.

$ ./gradlew build --max-workers 2

Running Gradle in Different Directory

Just like Ruby's bundler that search Gemfile in our current directory first, Gradle also finds the build.gradle in our current directory. So how we can use build.gradle in another directory without actually in that directory?

You could use -p or --project-dir to specify the path for your build.gradle

$ ./gradlew build -p parent/another_directory/project

Passing Parameter with Default Value

It's pretty easy to pass a custom parameter to your Gradle tasks. You can specify it with -P along with your parameter name. For some example, if we want to pass a parameter called doBarrelRoll you just have to pass it like this

$ ./gradlew build -PdoBarrelRoll=yes

Then what you have to do in your gradle file is

// This will have a type of String
final doBarrelRoll = project.property('doBarrelRoll')

And then, when you want to put some default value because you don't pass it every time you run your tasks you can add this

final doBarrelRoll = project.hasProperty('doBarrelRoll')
  ? project.property('doBarrelRoll')
  : "no"

Extra: if you want to pass a boolean type, you can use toBoolean() function. That's neat!

See you later 👋