How to get IntelliJ to associate Gradle sources with build.gradle?

Question

When writing Gradle scripts for my Java project, specifically, when writing build.gradle files, IntelliJ does not recognize the Gradle API.

For instance, Gradle methods calls like apply, dependencies configure appear with a black line under them and it is not possible to navigate to method declarations, there is no auto-completion etc.

I managed to work around this by adding compile gradleApi() to the build's dependencies block. However, I don't want to have this explicit dependency in my code.

I tried editing IntelliJ's project structure and add a dependency on a Gradle library (tried gradle-core and gradle-all) to my modules, but that seems to have no effect.

Is there a way to make IntelliJ associate all build.gradle files with the Gadle sources?

Answer 1

I solved this problem as follows:

1. As mention in already posted answers, configure gradle

• update gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties file
  change bin to all in distributionUrl i.e.
  distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-6.8.3-bin.zip
  to
  distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-6.8.3-all.zip OR
  [optional] If you are using old version of gradle wrapper and wanted to upgrade, then execute

  ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 6.8.3 --distribution-type all
  

• Update gradle task (if present in build file)

  wrapper {
      gradleVersion = '6.8.3'
      distributionType = Wrapper.DistributionType.ALL
  }
  

2. Before importing the project to IntelliJ-Idea IDE, update build.gradle and add java and idea plugin to the plugins list

plugins {
    id "java-library"
    id "idea"
}

3. From a terminal, execute ./gradlew clean build idea or simply ./gradlew idea
4. Import project to IntelliJ idea.
   Go to Preferences --> build,Execution,Deployment --> BuildTools --> Gradle
   You can see
5. Restart IntelliJ idea IDE.

---

So above we have configured both of the options so choose either of them, except the specified location option. That's it.

Before

After

Autocomplete functionality as mentioned in this answer.