gradle vs gradlew

• gradlew is a wrapper
• A wrapper is a script that invokes a declared version of Gradle, downloading it beforehand if necessary

When building projects on a cloud, use ./gradlew over gradle

The former command executes an existing file while the later is a call to an executable that should have to been already installed and configured.

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Adding the wrapper §

• If you have a Gradle project that doesn’t already have a wrapper, you can add the wrapper
• Every vanilla Gradle build comes with a built-in task called wrapper
• Run gradle wrapper to generate the necessary wrapper files
• Generated files,
  • gradle-wrapper.jar - JAR file containing code for downloading the Gradle distribution
  • gradle-wrapper.properties - wrapper config
  • gradlew - a shell script to execute the build with the wrapper
  • gradlew.bat - a windows batch script to execute the build with the wrapper
• The generated wrapper will reside within the gradle directory in the project’s root

  ├── a-subproject
  │   └── build.gradle.kts
  ├── settings.gradle.kts
  ├── gradle
  │   └── wrapper
  │       ├── gradle-wrapper.jar
  │       └── gradle-wrapper.properties
  ├── gradlew
  └── gradlew.bat
  

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Wrapper definition §

Found in gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties,

distributionBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
distributionPath=wrapper/dists
distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-8.7-bin.zip
networkTimeout=10000
validateDistributionUrl=true
zipStoreBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
zipStorePath=wrapper/dists

• Changing the Gradle version of a project is now a simple change in the wrapper definition. It can even be made by running ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 8.3

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Refs §

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39627231/difference-between-using-gradlew-and-gradle
2. https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.html#:~:text=The%20Wrapper%20is%20a%20script,more%20reliable%20and%20robust%20builds.