August 2021

This issue covers:

• Blog posts and videos from the Gradle community
• Gradle 7 Survey
• Gradle Build Tool releases, the official Gradle GitHub Action, and the Exemplar library
• Careers
• Upcoming events

From the Community

Blog Posts

• How to Exclude Gradle Dependencies - explains ways to exclude unwanted dependencies
• Basic Use of Android Product Flavors/Build Variants - demonstrates how to use product flavours and build variants in Android builds

Videos

• Understanding Gradle - a new video series from a former Gradle engineer that explains the basics of the settings file, build files, and plugins
• Power Up Your Gradle - discusses various good practices and tips for working with Gradle

Gradle 7 Survey

Please give us your feedback. The Gradle Build Tool engineering team has released Gradle 7 and wants to learn more about the community’s upgrade plans, as well as to understand the reasons behind the decision to upgrade or not to upgrade at this time.

The information will be used to prioritize development efforts and address upgrade impediments. The plan is to follow-up with you with information intended to answer your specific upgraded-related questions and help you get the most value out of the Gradle Build Tool. This survey will take less than 90 seconds to complete.

Launch Survey!

Gradle Build Tool Releases

Gradle 7.2

Gradle 7.2 has been released. It provides toolchain support for Scala projects, improves build cache hits between operating systems, and makes remote HTTP build cache more resilient when encountering problems. See the release notes for details and the full list of enhancements and bug fixes.

Gradle 6.9.1

The Gradle 6.9.1 release backports several changes from 7.x to 6.x including an important bug fix preventing builds from running on the Windows FAT file system. See the release notes for details.

Official Gradle GitHub Action 1.4.0

Gradle now provides an official mechanism for executing Gradle builds as part of any GitHub Actions workflow. Starting with version 1.4.0, the Gradle Build Action is provided and maintained by the Gradle Team.

The action simplifies the use of GitHub Actions for Gradle builds by automating the installation of different Gradle versions and leveraging the GitHub Actions cache to speed up build execution.

Exemplar 1.0.0

Exemplar is a library developed by the Gradle team that tests output from command-line tools. For example, Gradle uses this library to verify samples in the documentation.

As of version 1.0, Exemplar is available on Maven Central under updated coordinates:

org.gradle.exemplar:samples-check:1.0.0

Other releases

Intellij IDEA 2021.2

IntelliJ IDEA 2021.2 has been released. It provides a redesigned UI of the Gradle Run/Debug Configurations, and improved support for projects located in WSL 2. See what’s new page for details.

Careers

If you share our passion for developer productivity and tooling, consider joining our globally distributed team and check out our job openings at gradle.com/careers. We are looking for software engineers, solution engineers and also a developer advocate and developer productivity engineer.

Upcoming Events

• Sep 13 9:00 am - 11:30 am (Pacific Time, US): Introduction to Developer Productivity Engineering
• Sep 21-22 8:30 am - 12:30 pm (Pacific Time, US): Training: Introduction to Gradle Build Tool
• Sep 29 9:00 am - 12:30 pm (Pacific Time, US): Training: Gradle Build Cache Deep Dive

See the Gradle Training webpage for an up-to-date list of all upcoming educational and training events.

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If you have some news you’d like us to share in the next issue, use #gradle on Twitter or send us an email with the details to newsletter@gradle.com.

Until next time!

—The Gradle Team