gradle-wrapper-helper

Motivations:

Typical Gradle projects include a gradle wrapper in the gradlew binary file. Using the wrapper has the following benefits (as described in the official Gradle docs):

• Standardizes a project on a given Gradle version, leading to more reliable and robust builds.
• Provisioning a new Gradle version to different users and execution environment (e.g. IDEs or Continuous Integration servers) is as simple as changing the Wrapper definition.
• Developers can get up and running with a Gradle project quickly without having to follow manual installation processes saving your company time and money.

However, running commands with the Gradle wrapper can be a bit clunky and might encourage your developers to download a local version of Gradle themselves anyway. If you have the following project directory structure:

root:
 gradlew
 some-module:
   some-sub-module:
     even-deeper-submodule:
       src/main/...
       build.gradle

Building the even-deeper-submodule module with the Gradle wrapper would require running the command ../../../gradlew build, which is quite verbose and easy to mistype. If you download a local version of gradle you could simply run gradle build instead from the even-deeper-submodule directory.

If we could access the Gradle wrapper with commands as simple as the local Gradle version, we would get the best of both worlds. That is what this project attempts to solve.

Installation:

Clone this repo to any local directory. cd into the cloned repository and run ./gw install.

If the installation succeeds, you should see gw install complete! in the console.

You will need to restart your terminal following installation before usage.

You can feel free to delete the cloned repository after installation has completed, although re-installation will require re-cloning this repo.

Usage:

To execute a Gradle task using the Gradle wrapper, simply run gw [cmd] from any Gradle project or submodule. If you have the following project directory strucute:

root:
 gradlew
 some-module:
   some-sub-module:
     even-deeper-submodule:
       src/main/...
       build.gradle

To build the even-deeper-submodule you can simply run gw build from the even-deeper-submodule directory instead of running ../../../gradlew build.