Gradle Goodness: Check Task Dependencies With a Dry Run

We can run a Gradle build without any of the task actions being executed. This is a so-called dry run of our build. We can use the dry run of a build to see if the task dependencies we have defined or are defined in a plugin are defined properly. Because all tasks and task dependencies are resolved if we use the dry run mode we can see in the output which tasks are executed.

We define a simple build file with three tasks and some task dependencies:

0. def printTaskNameAction = {
1. println "Running ${it.name}"
2. }
3.
4. task first << printTaskNameAction
5.
6. task second(dependsOn: first) << printTaskNameAction
7.
8. task third(dependsOn: [first, second]) << printTaskNameAction

To run a Gradle build as a dry run we can use the command line option -m or --dry-run. So let's execute the task third with the dry run command line option:

$ gradle -m third
:first SKIPPED
:second SKIPPED
:third SKIPPED

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 2.242 secs
$

And we see in the output none of the tasks are really executed, because SKIPPED is shown, but we do see the task names of the tasks that are resolved.

Written with Gradle 2.2.