Prerequisites

Gradle requires a Java JDK and a JAVA_HOME environment variable pointing to the JDK. 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 require a JDK 1.5 or higher. Beginning with 0.3 we also provide a distinct JDK 1.4 compatible distribution.

Unpacking

The Gradle distribution comes only as zip. Additional to the binaries it is shipped with:

For Un*x users

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.

Environment variables

For running Gradle, the GRADLE_HOME environment variable needs to point to the root directory of your Gradle installation. Then add GRADLE_HOME/bin to your path.

Running and testing your 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 0.3-080820065915+0200
    Gradle buildtime: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 6:59:15 AM CEST
    Groovy 1.5.5
    Java 1.5.0_13
    JVM 1.5.0_13-121
    JVM Vendor: "Apple Computer, Inc."
    OS Name: Mac OS X

JVM Options

Un*x users can set JVM options for running Gradle by either defining an environment variable GRADLE_OPTS, or by setting the GRADLE_OPTS variable at the beginning of the gradle script.

Windows users can set JVM options by adding a gradle.l4j.ini text file into the same directory where gradle.exe is located. Such a file might look like this: 

    -Dsomevar="%SOMEVAR%"
    -Xms512m

Getting Help

You might check the userguide at GRADLE_HOME/docs/userguide. Typing gradle -h prints the command line help. Typing gradle -t shows all the tasks of a gradle build.