October 2025

Welcome to the October 2025 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! This month, we're bringing you a new Develocity IntelliJ plugin, a first look at Develocity Artifact Cache, Provenance Governor, and MCP Server, with highlights from DPE Summit 2025.

From the community

New posts

• Shrinking Elephants – Tony Robalik and Josh Friend detail how they cut IntelliJ/Gradle syncs in a giant Kotlin monorepo from minutes to ~15s.

• Input to Your Inputs: What Invalidates Gradle Configuration Cache? – Aurimas Liutikas explores how Gradle determines task inputs behind the scenes and explains the mechanics of task dependency inference to help you write more accurate and cache-friendly builds.

• Develocity IntelliJ Plugin: Speed Up Gradle Builds with Local Insights – The Gradle team introduces an IntelliJ plugin that surfaces build performance insights (e.g., slow tasks, cache misses, and configuration issues) directly in the IDE and offers guided fixes so you can speed up Gradle builds without leaving your editor. Don’t miss the webinar.

• Gradle Version Checking – Aurimas Liutikas shows how to fail fast when the wrong Gradle version is used, align IDE and CI, and roll out repo-wide guards to reduce “works on my machine” drift and support smooth upgrades.

• How to Configure Gradle: The Ultimate Guide – Serhii Hryshyn walks through advanced Gradle configuration techniques, covering topics such as buildscript blocks, plugin management, dependency resolution strategies, and performance optimizations.

• Android Optimized R8 – Sergio De Simone covers enhancements to R8 that focus on Android optimization, detailing how the updated code shrinker improves performance and reduces APK size.

New videos

• Carefree Dependency Management in Java Projects (8-part video series) – A hands-on series from Jendrik Johannes at javarca.de on keeping Gradle/Maven builds stable without fuss.

• Integrating Kotlin Code into the Gradle Build Process – This talk by Michael Ehrmann at droidcon Berlin 2025 shows how to weave Kotlin code seamlessly into the Gradle build pipeline, covering best practices, plugin usage, and tips for maintaining cohesive build logic.

New releases

• JRuby Gradle Plugin 2.2.0 has a major new feature, making alternative gem sources much easier to adopt.

• Asciidoctor Gradle Plugin 5.0.0-alpha.1 marks the beginning of the next major version of the plugin. This release introduces important updates and lays the groundwork for future improvements.

• CycloneDX Gradle Plugin 3.0.1 has been updated to Gradle 9. This plugin produces a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) covering both direct and transitive project dependencies.

• OpenRewrite Gradle Plugin 7.18.0 helps automate technical debt elimination and code transformation via rewrite rules. This latest release includes best practices!

From the Gradle team

Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.2.2

If you’re not already publishing a Build Scan® whenever you build your Gradle projects, now is the perfect time to try. The Develocity Gradle Plugin (formerly the Build Scan plugin) makes it effortless, and our Build Scan service is completely free to use.

A Build Scan gives you instant visibility into how your build behaves by showing detailed performance breakdowns, dependency resolution insights, test results with stack traces, and more. In case of multiple failures, the Build Scan will group failures with the same reason together to streamline the troubleshooting experience.

For example, the Build Scan below quickly reveals which direct dependency (minio) pulled in a vulnerable transitive dependency (bouncycastle). Just two clicks to the answer:

Here, Build Scan finds that 40 failures boil down to 4 root-cause groups:

Because each Build Scan is a simple shareable URL, troubleshooting with teammates becomes dramatically easier. To learn more, visit our Build Scan page.

The latest release, Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.2.2, is now available.