We will build the same example Groovy project defined in the Integrating Groovy into the build process using Ant recipe. We assume that you have at least some familiarity with Gradle, and it is already installed on your system. Otherwise, you can refer to the installation page (http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/installation.html) of the Gradle User Guide.

At first glance, a Gradle script may seem too simple to be actually functional. This is one of the strengths of the product: simplicity and power.

As you can probably guess, all the logic required for Groovy integration is built into the groovy plugin declared on the first line of the build script. The remaining content of the script has the following functions:

Upon build completion, the code will be compiled and tested. The result of the build activity including compiled classes and JUnit report files will be located in the automatically created build directory.

The Gradle build script language is actually a Groovy DSL. That's why you can define tasks directly using Groovy. For example, you can add an info task that prints the project test code dependencies:

task info << {
  println "Name: $project.name"
  println 'Dependencies: '
  project.configurations.testCompile.allDependencies.each {
    println it.name
  }
}

To execute the task, you can just type gradle info.

A more detailed introduction to Gradle features is out of scope for this recipe, and it's actually worth a separate book.