Gradle – Difference between using gradlew and gradle

gradlegradlew

What is the difference between using gradlew and gradle or are they the same?

Best Answer

The difference lies in the fact that ./gradlew indicates you are using a gradle wrapper. The wrapper is generally part of a project and it facilitates installation of gradle. If you were using gradle without the wrapper you would have to manually install it - for example, on a mac brew install gradle and then invoke gradle using the gradle command. In both cases you are using gradle, but the former is more convenient and ensures version consistency across different machines.

Each Wrapper is tied to a specific version of Gradle, so when you first run one of the commands above for a given Gradle version, it will download the corresponding Gradle distribution and use it to execute the build.

Not only does this mean that you don’t have to manually install Gradle yourself, but you are also sure to use the version of Gradle that the build is designed for. This makes your historical builds more reliable

Also, Udacity has a neat, high level video explaining the concept of the gradle wrapper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aA949H-shk

Related Solutions

Gradle – How to force gradle to redownload dependencies

Generally, you can refresh dependencies in your cache with the command line option --refresh-dependencies. You can also delete the cached files under ~/.gradle/caches. With the next build Gradle would attempt to download them again.

What is your specific use case? Do you use dynamic dependency versions or SNAPSHOT versions?

On Unix systems, you can delete all the existing artifacts (artifacts and metadata) Gradle has downloaded using:

rm -rf $HOME/.gradle/caches/

Android Studio: Add jar as library

I've been struggling with the same thing for many hours, trying to get the Gson jar to work no less. I finally cracked it – here are the steps I took:

Put the Gson jar (in my case, gson-2.2.4.jar) into the libs folder
Right click it and hit 'Add as library'
Ensure that compile files('libs/gson-2.2.4.jar') is in your build.gradle file (or compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: '*.jar') if you are using many jar files)

Edit : Use implementation files('libs/gson-2.2.4.jar') (or implementation fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: '*.jar')) in Android Studio 3.0+
Do a clean build (you can probably do this fine in Android Studio, but to make sure I navigated in a terminal to the root folder of my app and typed gradlew clean. I'm on Mac OS X, the command might be different on your system

After I did the above four, it started working fine. I think the 'Add as library' step was the one I'd previously missed, and it didn't work until I cleaned it either.

[Edit - added the build.gradle step which is also necessary as others have pointed out]

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Gradle – How to force gradle to redownload dependencies

Android Studio: Add jar as library

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