"make the impossible possible, the possible easy, and the easy elegant." (Moshé Feldenkrais)

Build Gradle from the source

Get the sources

Either download the source distribution or check out Gradle from svn.

Execute the Build

We use Gradle to build Gradle. But Gradle does not need to be installed on your machine to build it. Svn and the source distribution contain a Gradle binary distribution capable of building Gradle. With the Gradle wrapper you can build Gradle via this internal Gradle distribution. Just go to the top level directory of the svn checkout or the Gradle source distribution and type:

Windows:

    gradlew clean dists

*nix:

    ./gradlew clean dists

In the build/distributions folder you can find the generated Gradle distributions.

The Gradle build is usually an early adopter of new Gradle features. If you want to build HEAD, it is therefore not unlikely that you can't build it with the last Gradle release. But you can simply use the wrapper scripts as described above.

To learn more about the Gradle wrapper and how you can use it for your own projects build with Gradle have a look at chapter 16 in the user's guide.

Installing Gradle with the Build

The Gradle build has an install task:

    ./gradlew clean install

The install task deletes any existing Gradle distribution at the specified destination. You need to specify the install destinaton with two project properties:

Property	Meaning
gradle_installDir	The parent directory of the top level directory of the Gradle distribution. (For Windows users: Please use '/' as a file separator).
gradle_installDirName	The name of the top level directory of the Gradle distribution.

You can set this properties in the gradle.properties file of your Gradle home directory (usually USER_HOME/.gradle). For how to set project properties you may see also section 4.4 of the user's guide.

PLEASE NOTE: The install functionality is a new feature not available in this form for the gradle-0.2 source distribution.