Gradle is an alternative building tool to the widely used Maven. In this post I would not describe what Gradle is and why you should switch to it. It is already very well explained on the official web site gradle.org, personally it feels more concise, developer friendly and productive build tool comparing to Maven.

Although official web site has a nice and good enough user guide documentation, it still might take some time to build all the necessary pieces together. So, here I share my Gradle 'Getting Started' which contains all the minimum necessary parts for every product you would like to build to include.

The key features of the provided template are:

• JaCoCo coverage
  • Checkstyle/PMD/FindBugs/JDepend integration
  • Spock for testing (Groovy based)
  • checkCoverage custom task to run tests and JaCoCo coverage together

    description = 'fill product description'
    
    apply plugin: 'java'
    // groovy is required for Spock
    apply plugin: 'groovy'
    
    apply from: 'gradle/code-coverage.gradle'
    apply from: 'gradle/code-quality.gradle'
    
    sourceCompatibility = targetCompatibility = 1.8
    
    version = '1.0.0'
    
    sourceSets {
        main {
            java {
                srcDir 'src/java'
            }
        }
        test {
            groovy {
                srcDir 'test/groovy'
            }
        }
    }
    
    ext {
        groovyMajorVersion = 2.4
        groovyMinorVersion = 3
    }
    
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }
    
    dependencies {
        testCompile "org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:${groovyMajorVersion}.${groovyMinorVersion}"
        testCompile "org.spockframework:spock-core:1.0-groovy-${groovyMajorVersion}"
    }
    
    task wrapper(type: Wrapper) {
        gradleVersion = '2.5'
    }
    
    task checkCoverage(dependsOn: ['test', 'jacocoTestReport']) {
        description 'Runs all tests and JaCoCo coverage'
        doLast {
            def reports = [test, jacocoTestReport].collect({
                def buildPath = buildDir.path
                def buildDirName = buildPath[buildPath.lastIndexOf(File.separator)..-1]
                '.' + buildDirName + it.reports.html.destination.path - buildPath
            })
            println "\n\tReports are avaialable at ${reports[0]} and ${reports[1]}"
        }
    }
    

where gradle/code-coverage.gradle is:

apply plugin: 'jacoco'

jacoco {
    toolVersion = '0.7.5.201505241946'
}

and gradle/code-quality.gradle is:

apply plugin: 'jdepend'
apply plugin: 'pmd'
apply plugin: 'checkstyle'
apply plugin: 'findbugs'

jdepend {
    toolVersion = '2.9.1'
}

jdependMain {
    reports {
        xml.enabled = false
        text.enabled = true
    }
}

pmd {
    toolVersion = '5.3.2'
}

checkstyle {
    toolVersion = '6.7'
}

findbugs {
    toolVersion = '3.0.1'
}

findbugsMain {
    reports {
        xml.enabled = false
        html.enabled = true
    }
}

The complete source code with directory structure and Checkstyle configuration file could be found on GitHub: https://github.com/zshamrock/gradle-getting-started-template