Gradle Setup and Usage - WayKoi/Othello GitHub Wiki

Written by Kyle Findlay

Edits by Chris Fitzgerald

The first step to using the code given is to install Gradle if you do not already have it.

Note: for gradle to work you need Java JDK version 8 or higher, to check if you have java installed open a terminal and use the command java -version

Installation

Note: if you have SDKMAN! you can use the following command

sdk install gradle 8.4

Note: if you have Homebrew you can use the command

brew install gradle

If you do not have either of those you can install manually instead doing Step 1 and following 2 steps from the below tutorials based on your operating system and finally Step 4.

Step 1: Download the version of Gradle you want from Here, I suggest downloading the Binary-Only version. The version of Gradle this project uses is 8.4 so make sure to get that version or later.

Windows

Step 2:

Open up File explorer and create a new directory with the name C:\Gradle

Open a second File Explorer open the downloaded ZIP file and drag the gradle-8.4 folder into the C:\Gradle folder

Step 3:

Hit the Windows key and type Environment Variables and hit enter

A window with the title System Properties should appear. Move to the Advanced tab and click the button labeled Environment Variables

Then double click the variable labeled Path and a new window labeled Edit environment variable should have opened.

Click the button that says New and type C:\Gradle\gradle-8.4\bin and click OK to save.

Mac / Linux

Step 2:

Use the following commands to unzip the distribution and use the ls command to make sure it worked

$ mkdir /opt/gradle
$ unzip -d /opt/gradle gradle-8.4-bin.zip
$ ls /opt/gradle/gradle-8.4
LICENSE  NOTICE  bin  getting-started.html  init.d  lib  media

Step 3:

use the following command to change the PATH environment variable

$ export PATH=$PATH:/opt/gradle/gradle-8.4/bin

Step 4:

Now is the time to make sure the installation worked open up a terminal and use the command

gradle -v

it should print the current version of Gradle that you have installed

Usage

For Othello

For Othello you would cd to the directory containing the build.gradle file and run the game with the command

Note: we use the --console plain flag to remove the prints gradle produces to make the game printouts more readable. Try running it without this flag to see the difference

gradle run --console plain

Setting up Gradle with your own project

To start open a terminal and simply cd to an empty directory that you would like your project to be in. Then run the command:

gradle init

Gradle will then ask you a couple of questions to build the project. The first of which is:

Select type of project to generate:
  1: basic
  2: application
  3: library
  4: Gradle plugin
Enter selection (default: basic) [1..4]

The one you want to pick here is up to your project. For Othello we used application and chose Java or Groovy when prompted for languages. You will then be asked "Generate multiple subprojects for application?", which you should pick "no".

Note: Gradle can be used for a whole host of other programming languages, not just Java, like C++, Groovy and Swift

When generating an application Gradle will also ask you what testing framework you could like to use. For Java by default Gradle supports:

JUnit 4
TestNG
Spock
JUnit Jupiter

Note: Gradle also supports other test frameworks you just have to edit the build.gradle to support them

Building, Running and Testing

If you have Gradle generate a build.gradle file these are the commands to build, run and test your project respectively.

Note: for any gradle command you can use the --help flag, like this gradle [command] --help, to see all the possible flags for the command with descriptions

To build the project

gradle build

To build (if needed) and run

gradle run

To test the project

gradle test

When using gradle test Gradle generates an HTML report that can be found in app/build/reports/tests/test by default