Moving from Maven to Gradle in under 5 minutes

• How to move a project from Maven to Gradle

For mainly historic reasons I've been a heavy Maven users for all my projects and not really dipped more than a toe into the 'holy grail' that is Gradle.

So I was pleased to be set the challenge by one of my clients, that as part of the delivery they wanted the code moved from Maven to Gradle.

After a bit of research (as well as some trial and error) I can take you through the steps that should be able to convert a Maven project to Gradle in about 5 minutes. (Note I've used IntelliJ but I would imagine this should be pretty much the same on any other IDE - or even if you're not using an IDE). 

1. Install Gradle on your machine.  You can get the software from here.
2. Check out (or copy) your code into a new directory.  This is not strictly necessary but it makes things cleaner.
3. cd into the directory that contains your pom.xml
4. Run the command: run gradle init.  This will create a new gradle project creating a build.gradle file based on your pom.xml.  (Note this is an incubator feature but it seems to work quite well).
5. Create a new IntelliJ project as follows:  File -> New -> Project From Existing Sources. Select the build.gradle file you created in the previous step and choose the following defaults as in this dialog:

That's really all there is to it. A brand new Gradle project.

Here are some additional notes I found useful as a Gradle newbie:

1. If you want to include files you already have in your existing Maven .m2 repo add mavenLocal() as a dependency.
2. Your dependencies get downloaded here (the equivalent of .m2): 
   .gradle/caches/modules-2/files-2.1
3. This is the correct way to define jdk compatibility:def javaVersion = JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8;sourceCompatibility = javaVersion;targetCompatibility = javaVersion;
4. To see the results of your tests as they are running add this method to your build.gradletest { testLogging {     events "started", "passed", "skipped", "failed", "standardOut", "standardError" }}
5. If you have repositories that need authentication see here.