Gradle Release Notes

Version 5.6

The Gradle team is excited to announce Gradle 5.6.

This release features improvements to make Groovy compilation faster, a new plugin for Java test fixtures and better management of plugin versions in multi-project builds.

This is the final minor release for Gradle 5.x. There are many other smaller features and improvements made, so please check out the full release notes below.

This release also contains an important security fix affecting some users.

We would like to thank the following community contributors to this release of Gradle:

Louis CAD, Roberto Perez Alcolea, Dan Sănduleac, Andrew K., Noa Resare, Juan Martín Sotuyo Dodero, Semyon Levin, wreulicke, John Rodriguez, mig4, Evgeny Mandrikov, Bjørn Mølgård Vester, Simon Legner, Sebastian Schuberth, Ian Kerins, Ivo Anjo, Stefan M., Nickolay Chameev, Dominik Giger, Stephan Windmüller, Zemian Deng, Robin Verduijn, Sandu Turcan, Emmanuel Guérin, Nikita Skvortsov, and Christian Fränkel.

Upgrade Instructions Switch your build to use Gradle 5.6 by updating your wrapper: ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=5.6 See the Gradle 5.x upgrade guide to learn about deprecations, breaking changes and other considerations when upgrading to Gradle 5.6.

Faster Groovy compilation Gradle 5.6 includes two new features that accelerate Groovy compilation. Groovy compilation avoidance Gradle now supports experimental compilation avoidance for Groovy. This speeds up Groovy compilation by avoiding re-compiling dependent projects if there are no changes that would affect the output of their compilation. See Groovy compilation avoidance for more details. Incremental Groovy compilation When compilation is necessary, Gradle now has experimental support for incremental Groovy compilation. If only a small set of Groovy source files have been changed, only the affected source files will be recompiled. For example, if you only change one Groovy test class, Gradle doesn't need to recompile all Groovy test source files. Gradle will recompile only the changed classes and the classes that are affected by them. See Incremental Groovy compilation in the user manual for more details.

Test fixtures for Java projects Gradle 5.6 introduces a new Java test fixtures plugin that can be applied in combination with the java or java-library plugin to create a conventional testFixtures source set. Gradle will automatically perform the necessary wiring so that test compilation depends on test fixtures. More importantly, this plugin also allows other projects to depend on the test fixtures of the project. For example: dependencies { testImplementation ( testFixtures ( project ( ":my-lib" ))) }

Central management of plugin versions with settings script Gradle 5.6 makes it easier to manage the versions of plugins used by your build. By configuring all plugin versions in a settings script within the new pluginManagement.plugins {} block, build scripts can apply plugins via the plugins {} block without specifying a version. pluginManagement { plugins { id 'org.my.plugin' version '1.1' } } One benefit of managing plugin versions in this way is that the pluginManagement.plugins {} block does not have the same constrained syntax as a build script plugins {} block. Plugin versions may be loaded from gradle.properties , or defined programmatically. See plugin version management for more details.

Better performance for very large projects on Windows using the Java library plugin On Windows, very large multi-projects can suffer from a significant performance decrease in Java compilation when switching from the java to the java-library plugin. This is caused by the large number of class files on the classpath. You can now tell the java-library plugin to prefer jars over class folders on the compile classpath by setting the org.gradle.java.compile-classpath-packaging system property to true .

Improved handling of ZIP archives on classpaths Compile classpath and runtime classpath analysis will now detect the most common zip extension instead of only supporting .jar . Gradle will inspect nested zip archives as well instead of treating them as blobs. This improves the likelihood of build cache hits for tasks that take such nested zips as an input, e.g. when testing applications packaged as a fat jar. ZIP analysis also avoids unpacking entries that are irrelevant. e.g., Resource files on a compile classpath. This improves performance for projects with a large number of resource files.

Support for PMD incremental analysis The PMD plugin now supports using PMD's incremental analysis cache to improve performance when files have not changed in between builds. To enable incremental analysis, add the following to your PMD configuration: pmd { incrementalAnalysis = true } This was contributed by Juan Martín Sotuyo Dodero.

Executable Jar support with project.javaexec and JavaExec JavaExec and project.javaexec will now run an executable jar when the JavaExec.main property has not been set and the classpath resolves to a single file. Under these circumstances, Gradle will assume that the single jar in the classpath is an executable jar and will run it with java -jar . For proper execution, the Main-Class attribute will need to be set in the executable jar. Thanks to Stephan Windmüller for contributing the basis of this feature.

Fail the build on deprecation warnings The warning-mode command line option now has a new fail value that will behave like all and in addition fail the build if any deprecation warning was reported during the execution.

Changes to file name case on case-insensitive file systems are now handled correctly On case-insensitive file systems (e.g. NTFS and APFS), a file/folder rename where only the case is changed is now handled properly by Gradle's file copying operations. For example, renaming an input of a Copy task called file.txt to FILE.txt will now cause FILE.txt to be created in the destination directory. The Sync task and Project.copy() and sync() operations now also handle case-renames as expected.

Unavailable files are handled more gracefully Generally, broken symlinks, named pipes and unreadable files/directories (hereinafter referred to as unavailable files) found in inputs and outputs of tasks are handled gracefully from as if they don't exist. For example, copying into a directory with a leftover named pipe or broken symbolic link will no longer break the build.

Rich console output on Linux aarch64 machines Gradle can now detect that it is running in an interactive terminal on Linux aarch64 machines, and will generate rich console output (such as colored text, progress information) in this case. Thanks to Amey for adding this support to native-platform.

Debug support for forked Java processes Gradle has now a new DSL element to configure debugging for Java processes. project . javaexec { debugOptions { enabled = true port = 4455 server = true suspend = true } } This configuration appends the following JVM argument to the process: -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=4455 The debugOptions configuration is available for project.javaExec and for tasks using the JavaExec type, including the test task.

Improvements for plugin authors Worker API improvements This release introduces a number of improvements to the Worker API. First, the classpath is now cleaner when submitting work using classloader or process isolation. Extra jars (such as external jars used by Gradle itself) should no longer appear on the worker classpath. Second, new classes have been introduced to make defining the unit of work implementation more straightforward and type safe. This also makes it simpler to handle null values in work parameters. Instead of a Runnable , the unit of work is defined by extending the WorkAction and WorkParameters interfaces. For example: interface ReverseParameters extends WorkParameters { Property < File > getFileToReverse () Property < File > getDestinationFile () } abstract class ReverseFile implements WorkAction < ReverseParameters > { @ Override public void execute () { File fileToReverse = parameters . fileToReverse . get () parameters . destinationFile . get (). text = fileToReverse . text . reverse () if ( Boolean . getBoolean ( "org.gradle.sample.showFileSize" )) { println "Reversed ${fileToReverse.size()} bytes from ${fileToReverse.name}" } } } Last, new methods have been added to WorkerExecutor to make the API simpler and easier to use. The noIsolation() , classLoaderIsolation() and processIsolation() methods all return a WorkQueue object that can be used to submit multiple items of work that have the same requirements. For example: WorkQueue workQueue = workerExecutor . processIsolation () { ProcessWorkerSpec spec -> forkOptions { JavaForkOptions options -> options . maxHeapSize = "512m" options . systemProperty "org.gradle.sample.showFileSize" , "true" } } sourceFiles . each { file -> workQueue . submit ( ReverseFile . class ) { ReverseParameters parameters -> parameters . fileToReverse = file parameters . destinationFile = project . file ( "${outputDir}/${file.name}" ) } } See the user manual for more information on using the new API. The existing WorkerExecutor.submit() method can still be used, but will be deprecated in Gradle 6.0 and removed in Gradle 7.0. Task dependencies are honored for @Input properties of type Provider Gradle can automatically calculate task dependencies based on the value of certain task input properties. For example, for a property that is annotated with @InputFiles and that has type FileCollection or Provider<Set<RegularFile>> , Gradle will inspect the value of the property and automatically add task dependencies for any task output files or directories in the collection. In this release, Gradle also performs this analysis on task properties that are annotated with @Input and that have type Provider<T> (which also includes types such as Property<T> ). This allow you to connect an output of a task to a non-file input parameter of another task. For example, you might have a task that runs the git command to determine the name of the current branch, and another task that uses the branch name to produce an application bundle. With this change you can connect the output of the first task as an input of the second task, and avoid running the git command at configuration time. See the user manual for examples and more details. Convert a FileCollection to a Provider A new method FileCollection.getElements() has been added to allow the contents of the file collection to be viewed as a Provider . This Provider tracks the elements of the file collection and tasks that produce these files and can be connected to a Property instance. Finalize the value of a ConfigurableFileCollection A new method ConfigurableFileCollection.finalizeValue() has been added. This method resolves deferred values, such as Provider instances or Groovy closures or Kotlin functions, that may be present in the collection to their final file locations and prevents further changes to the collection. This method works similarly to other finalizeValue() methods, such as Property.finalizeValue() . Prevent changes to a Property or ConfigurableFileCollection New methods Property.disallowChanges() and ConfigurableFileCollection.disallowChanges() have been added. These methods disallow further changes to the property or collection. Provider methods New methods Provider.orElse(T) and Provider.orElse(Provider<T>) has been added. These allow you to perform an 'or' operation on a provider and some other value. Managed nested properties A custom type, such as a task type, plugin or project extension can be implemented as an abstract class or, in the case of project extensions and other data types, an interface. Under some conditions, Gradle can provide an implementation for abstract properties. Now, if the custom type has an abstract getter annotated with @Nested , Gradle will provide an implementation for the getter method and also create a value for the property. See the user manual for more information.

Improvements for tooling providers Debug tests via the Tooling API The Tooling API is now capable of launching tests in debug mode with the TestLauncher.debugTestsOn(port) method.

Promoted features Promoted features are features that were incubating in previous versions of Gradle but are now supported and subject to backwards compatibility. See the User Manual section on the “Feature Lifecycle” for more information. The following are the features that have been promoted in this Gradle release. Transforming dependency artifacts on resolution The API around artifact transforms is no longer incubating.

Fixed issues

Known issues Known issues are problems that were discovered post release that are directly related to changes made in this release.

External contributions We love getting contributions from the Gradle community. For information on contributing, please see gradle.org/contribute.