Gradle Goodness: Specify Wrapper Version and Distribution Type From Command Line
Gradle has the built-in task wrapper to create a Gradle wrapper.
The Gradle wrapper can be part of our project so other people can build our project with Gradle, without the need for them to install Gradle.
Also if we specify the Gradle wrapper we can make sure the correct Gradle version is used.
To specify the version we must use the option --gradle-version.
This version can be different than the Gradle version we use to create the Gradle wrapper.
Since Gradle 3.1 we can also specify the distribution type of the Gradle wrapper.
We choose between a binary distribution or the all distribution, which contains documentation and source code.
Especially IDEs like to have the all distribution type, so they can provide better help in their editors.
With the following wrapper command we create a wrapper for Gradle 3.1 and the all distribution type.
For a binary distribution we either use the value bin or we don't specify the option, so Gradle falls back to the default value bin.
$ gradle wrapper --gradle-version 3.1 --distribution-type all
:wrapper
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1.012 secs
$
We can check the file gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties and look for the key distributionUrl.
We see the value points to the correct Gradle version and distribution type:
$ more gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties
#Mon Sep 19 15:26:27 CEST 2016
distributionBase=GRADLE\_USER\_HOME
distributionPath=wrapper/dists
zipStoreBase=GRADLE\_USER\_HOME
zipStorePath=wrapper/dists
distributionUrl=https\\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-3.1-all.zip
$
Written with Gradle 3.1
