Gradle Goodness: Group Similar Tasks

In Gradle we can assign a task to a group. Gradle uses the group for example in the output of $ gradle -t to output all the tasks of the same group together. We only have to set the group property with a value and our task belongs to a group.

In the following sample we add the tasks hello and bye to the group Greeting:

00. def GREETING_GROUP = 'Greeting'
01.
02. task hello << {
03. println 'Hello Gradle!'
04. }
05. hello.group = GREETING_GROUP
06. hello.description = 'Say hello.'
07.
08. task bye {
09. description= 'Say goodbye.'
10. group = GREETING_GROUP
11. }
12. bye << {
13. println 'Goodbye.'
14. }

If we run $ gradle -t we get the following output:

:tasks

------------------------------------------------------------
Root Project
------------------------------------------------------------

Greeting tasks
--------------
bye - Say goodbye.
hello - Say hello.

Help tasks
----------
dependencies - Displays a list of the dependencies of root project 'taskgroup'.
help - Displays a help message
projects - Displays a list of the sub-projects of root project 'taskgroup'.
properties - Displays a list of the properties of root project 'taskgroup'.
tasks - Displays a list of the tasks in root project 'taskgroup'.

To see all tasks and more detail, run with --all.