Gradle requires a Java JDK to be installed. Gradle ships with its own Groovy library, therefore no Groovy needs to be installed. Any existing Groovy installation is ignored by Gradle. The standard Gradle distribution requires a JDK 1.5 or higher. We also provide a distinct JDK 1.4 compatible distribution.
Gradle uses whichever JDK it finds in your path (to check, use java -version).
Alternatively, you can set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the install directory
of the desired JDK.
You can download one of the Gradle distributions from the Gradle web site.
The Gradle distribution comes packaged as a ZIP. The full distribution contains:
The Gradle binaries.
The user guide (HTML and PDF).
The API documentation (Javadoc and Groovydoc).
Extensive samples, including the examples referenced in the user guide, along with some complete and more complex builds you can use the starting point for your own build.
The binary sources (If you want to build Gradle you need to download the source distribution or checkout the sources from the source repository).
You need a GNU compatible tool to unzip Gradle, if you want the file permissions to be properly set. We mention this as some zip front ends for Mac OS X don't restore the file permissions properly.
For running Gradle, add
to your GRADLE_HOME/binPATH
environment variable. Usually, this is sufficient to run Gradle. Optionally, you may also want to set the
GRADLE_HOME environment variable to point to the root directory of your Gradle installation.
You run Gradle via the gradle command. To check if Gradle is properly installed just type gradle -v and you should get an output like:
------------------------------------------------------------ Gradle 0.8 ------------------------------------------------------------ Gradle buildtime: Monday, September 28, 2009 1:53:43 PM CEST Groovy: 1.6.4 Ant: Apache Ant version 1.7.0 compiled on December 13 2006 Ivy: 2.1.0-rc2 Java: 1.6.0_15 JVM: 14.1-b02-90 JVM Vendor: Apple Inc. OS Name: Mac OS X
JVM options for running Gradle can be set via environment variables. You can use GRADLE_OPTS
or JAVA_OPTS. Those variables can be used together. JAVA_OPTS is by convention an environment
variable shared by many Java applications. A typical use case would be to set the HTTP proxy in JAVA_OPTS
and the memory options in GRADLE_OPTS. Those variables can also be set at the beginning
of the gradle or gradlew script.