Build life cycle

Gradle build has a life cycle, which consists of three phases: initialization, configuration, and execution. Understanding the build life cycle and the execution phases is crucial for Gradle developers. Gradle build is primarily a collection of tasks and a user can define the dependency between the tasks. So, even if two tasks depend on the same task, for example, Task C and Task B both depend on Task A, Gradle makes sure that Task A will execute only once throughout the execution of the build script.

Before executing any task, Gradle prepares a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of all tasks for the build. It is directed because a task directly depends on another task. It is acyclic because, if Task A depends on Task B and if you make Task B depend on Task A, it will result in an error, as there can't be cyclic dependency between two tasks. Before executing the build script, Gradle configures the task dependency graph.

Let's quickly discuss the three build phases.