From the Community#

New Posts#

• Choosing Between Gradle Version Catalogs and Dependency Platforms: A Guide for Application Developers by Benedikt Ritter
• Stifle Hungry Tasks using BuildService by Aurimas Liutikas
• Build Faster, Ship Sooner: How we reduced 80% of our build time with Build Caching and GitHub Actions by Alpesh Vas
• Enabling Gradle Dependency Verification: A Practical Guide by Benedikt Ritter
• This is why we can’t have nice things: When POM files lie and how to address it in Gradle by Tony Robalik
• The Tragedy of Build Classpath by Aurimas Liutikas, as a follow-up to Tony’s post with best practices

New Videos#

• Gradle Subprojects, Dependencies & Testfixtures by Duncan McGregor
• Hotwire Native Android with Jumpstart Pro Android - New Android course by Donn Felker with a lot of Gradle topics covered
• Java App CI/CD Observability with Gradle and Quarkus by Oleg Nenashev
• Gradle Build Refactoring - Extract a Subproject by Duncan McGregor
• Custom Gradle Plugins: Clean Up Your Build Scripts! By the Kotlearn team

New Releases#

• TheInfrastructure as Code (IAC) Plugin for Gradle, previously known as the Terraform plugin, added support forOpenTofu in the 2.0.0-alpha-1 release. With the final 2.0 release on the horizon, your feedback is essential—try it out and share your thoughts!

From the Gradle Team#

Gradle Build Tool 8.13#

The latest Gradle Build Tool release, 8.13, is here! This update introducesDaemon JVM auto-provisioning, which automatically downloads the required JVM for the Gradle Daemon. It also adds explicitScala version configuration and JUnit XML timestamps withmillisecond precision.

For build authors and plugin developers, this release adds improved access to the settings directory in build scripts, a new Artifact Transform report, custom test report generation, and the new distribution-base plugin.

Thank you to all contributors! You can read more in the Gradle Build Tool8.13 Release Notes.

Gradle Build Tool 8.12.1 Release Video#

We just published arelease video and team demos for Gradle Build Tool 8.12.1, which was released in January. The video provides an overview of the features and includes engineer demos. If you’re upgrading to the 8.12 baseline from older versions, make sure to upgrade to 8.12.1 directly.

For all Gradle Build Tool release videos, seethis playlist on our YouTube channel. And make sure to subscribe!

Building a Better Developer Experience: A Collaboration Between Gradle, Google, and JetBrains#

Anew blog post is live! Developers are at the heart of everything we do at Gradle, and the same goes for our partners, Google and JetBrains. You, our community of developers, are the ones who create all the programs and services that continuously improve and enhance our daily lives. To do that effectively, you need reliable tools and IDEs that are powerful yet easy to use. That’s why JetBrains, Gradle, and Google have joined forces to address these needs head-on: simplify configuration, minimize friction between the parts involved, and make development more enjoyable.

This collaboration is already delivering real results, including:

• Kotlin DSL as the default for new builds in Gradle Build Tool since 2023.
• Better IDE Integration – Gradle sync in IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio has become faster and more reliable, with more precise feedback when something goes wrong.
• Declarative Gradle initiative – A shift towards simpler, more readable, developer-first build configurations that reduce complexity and improve maintainability.
• Gradle Daemon toolchain support – A common way to define the JVM for the Gradle Daemon and ensure it always starts (and does so with the same JVM).
• Isolated Projects - Significant performance gains for large projects, thanks to Gradle’s improvements in isolating subprojects and optimizing caching.
• Various ecosystem and educational programs to gather more feedback and share best practices, driven or developed by theKotlin Foundation committees.

Read more about the ongoing collaboration and our future plans on the Kotlin Foundation website.

GSoC 2025 - Gradle Projects Are Live!#

We’re gearing up for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Kotlin Foundation has submitted its GSoC application—with 11 already-publishedproject ideas and counting, it will be the biggest GSoC to date. Multiple companies will be mentoring this year, including Gradle (for the third year running)!

Current project ideas for Gradle:

• 🔍 Clean and actionable reporting for Gradle code quality plugins for Kotlin
• 📦 Maven Central publishing plugin for Gradle with new APIs
• 🚅 Improving Configuration Cache and lock contention in key Gradle plugins
• 🔌 Gradle Convention plugin for developing Jenkins Plugins
• 📓 Kotlin DSL documentation samples test framework
• 👷 Build Server Protocol: add Kotlin support (together with JetBrains)

We’re looking for potential contributors and mentors and we welcome new project ideas. If you’re interested in participating, join the#gsoc channels on theGradle Community Slack and theKotlin Foundation Slack.

Upcoming Events#

Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you and discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, or Developer Productivity Engineering.

• February 27, Webinar -Observing build and CI productivity in your favorite OSS projects with Gašper Kojek.
• March 25,DPE Tour Palo Alto - In-person event at Meta HQ focused on Developer Productivity Engineering and Developer Experience and featuring talks from Meta, Microsoft, Uber, and Gradle (with our own Trisha Gee).
• May 21-23,Kotlinconf - Meet the Gradle Build Tool team at the Gradle and Kotlin Foundation booths! Alex Semin and Rodrigo Oliveira will also present on Fast inner dev loops for Kotlin builds with Gradle.
• September 23-24,DPE Summit by Gradle - Registration is now open! Grab your early-bird ticket while they last andthrow your hat in the ring to speak.

Featured Event: Observing build and CI productivity in your favorite OSS projects#

If you use Spring, JUnit, Testcontainers, or Hibernate, then you’re using open-source software that leverages Develocity for accelerated builds/tests and observability into failures, flaky tests, performance regressions, and more. We’re proud to sponsor free (public) instances of Develocity for over 20 well-known open-source projects, including those from the Apache Software Foundation, Spring Framework, Commonhaus Foundation, Micronaut Foundation, Kotlin Foundation, Scala Center, and many more.

In this webinar with Gašper Kojek, a Solutions Engineer at Gradle, we’ll review surprising insights gained from the data from over 50,000 OSS project builds per week. Register for the webinarhere.

Spread the Word#

We invite you to share news from this newsletter! Let’s help the authors and contributors! As always, this newsletter is also published in our Gradle Newsletter Archive, and you can share it as a link or subscribe via RSS.

Finally, the Call for Proposals for the March newsletter edition is already open.

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