Custom tasks

Gradle supports a variety of tasks for build automation, either from Gradle's in-house plugins or from third-party plugins. As we know the software adage, change is the only constant thing in software; the requirements and complexity change over the time. Many a times we come across different automation requirements for which no task or plugin is available in Gradle. In such cases, you can extend Gradle by adding custom tasks to the build.

A custom task is an enhanced task, which you add to Gradle to fulfill custom requirements. It can have input, output, configurations and more. Its scope is not only limited to the build file where it is defined; it can be reused in other projects by adding custom task JAR in the classpath. You can write custom tasks in Groovy, Java, and Scala. In this section, we will create custom task examples in Groovy.

Gradle provides different ways to add custom tasks in the build script:

• The build file

• The buildSrc directory inside the project directory

• Create...