Build System

Qi4j community migrated away from Maven after several years of frustration, especially around release management, versioning and cross-module dependency resolution issues, in Feb 2011. The tool of choice is now Gradle, and it doesn’t require any installation, there are gradlew and gradlew.bat in the root folder of the Qi4j SDK that will bootstrap Gradle if not done so already.

Versions

By default, the build system produces a "zero build". It means that there is no version assigned to the build, and a "0" is used in the produced artifacts. This is due to our disagreement (with Maven community) that the "next" version name/number is known prior to the release. This is in our opinion a delayed decision. To build a particular version, you specify a "version" property on the command-line, like

./gradlew -Dversion=2.0-FLAVOUR install

If a "version" property is not defined, the build system will refuse to make a release and upload.

Tasks

Gradle is very flexible, and we have defined (or in the process of defining) the following tasks (same as Ant’s targets).

clean

Clean up of all build output and restoring the code base to a fresh state.

check

This is the default build, which compiles the code and run the tests, but nothing else. A quick way to check that nothing broke.

install

Is roughly the same as Maven’s install goal. It produces the test reports and javadocs and installs all the Jars into the local disk repository, for consumption by other applications.

buildAll

Produces all the archives, javadocs, manuals and website content. The output is generated to qi4j-sdk/build.

release

Uploads the release artifacts to the distribution servers and creates the release output into the qi4j-sdk/build/distributions directory.

Configuration

Build System configuration is done through Gradle properties.

This can be done in many ways, see Gradle properties and system properties.

Signing

Artifact signing is done using PGP. You need to provide Gradle the following properties

signing.keyId=FB751943
signing.password=foobar
signing.secretKeyRingFile=/home/foo/.gnupg/secring.gpg

Artifact Upload

Artifact upload behavior depends on the version assigned to the build.

By default RELEASES are signed, SNAPSHOTS are not. Signing can be turned on or off by setting the uploadSigned property to false.

By default RELEASES must satisfy ReleaseSpecification, SNAPSHOT don’t. ReleaseSpecification usage can be turned on or off by setting the uploadReleaseSpec property to false.

By default RELEASES and SNAPHOTS are uploaded using WEBDAV. Used Wagon can be overriden by setting the uploadWagon property.

By default RELEASES and SNAPSHOTS are uploaded to Cloudbees. Target repository can be overriden by setting the uploadRepository property.

No username/password is provided by default. If needed set them using the uploadUsername and uploadPassword properties.

For example here is how to deploy all artifacts as unsigned SNAPSHOTs to a given repository:

./gradlew uploadArchives -Dversion=2.0-SNAPSHOT -PuploadReleaseSpec=false \
    -PuploadWagon=what:ever:wagon -PuploadRepository=http://what.ever.repository/url \
    -PuploadUsername=foo -PuploadPassword=bar

And here is how to deploy a signed release to the local filesystem:

./gradlew uploadArchives -Dversion=2.0 -PuploadRepository=file:///path/to/local/repository

See the Gradle documentation about supported protocols.