Getting Start Writing Custom Plugins of Gradle

Introduce

A Gradle plugin packages up reusable pieces of build logic, which can be used across many different projects and builds. Gradle allows you to implement your own custom plugins, so you can reuse your build logic, and share it with others.

You can implement a custom plugin in any language you like, provided the implementation ends up compiled as bytecode. For the examples here, we are going to use Groovy as the implementation language. You could use Java or Scala instead, if you want.

Writing a Custom Plugin

Packaging a plugin

There are several places where you can put the source for the plugin.

Build script

You can include the source for the plugin directly in the build script. This has the benefit that the plugin is automatically compiled and included in the classpath of the build script without you having to do anything. However, the plugin is not visible outside the build script, and so you cannot reuse the plugin outside the build script it is defined in.

buildSrc project

You can put the source for the plugin in the rootProjectDir/buildSrc/src/main/groovy directory. Gradle will take care of compiling and testing the plugin and making it available on the classpath of the build script. The plugin is visible to every build script used by the build. However, it is not visible outside the build, and so you cannot reuse the plugin outside the build it is defined in.

Organizing Build Logic for more details about the buildSrc project.

Standalone project

You can create a separate project for your plugin. This project produces and publishes a JAR which you can then use in multiple builds and share with others. Generally, this JAR might include some custom plugins, or bundle several related task classes into a single library. Or some combination of the two.

In our examples, we will start with the plugin in the build script, to keep things simple. Then we will look at creating a standalone project.

Writing a simple plugin

To create a custom plugin, you need to write an implementation of Plugin. Gradle instantiates the plugin and calls the plugin instance’s Plugin.apply(T) method when the plugin is used with a project. The project object is passed as a parameter, which the plugin can use to configure the project however it needs to. The following sample contains a greeting plugin, which adds a hello task to the project.

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build.gradle
apply plugin: GreetingPlugin

class GreetingPlugin implements Plugin<Project> {
    void apply(Project project) {
        project.task('hello') << {
            println "Hello from the GreetingPlugin"
        }
    }
}

run

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Output of gradle -q hello
> gradle -q hello
Hello from the GreetingPlugin

One thing to note is that a new instance of a given plugin is created for each project it is applied to. Also note that the Plugin class is a generic type. This example has it receiving the Project type as a type parameter. It’s possible to write unusual custom plugins that take different type parameters, but this will be unlikely (until someone figures out more creative things to do here).

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