Source code of Google's Gradle Plugin for building Android

Question

I want to learn how it works to build Android program. Do you know where I can download the source code of the build plugin of com.android.build.gradle?

Answer 1

If you have Android Studio, the android gradle plugin and an android app that builds, you should be able to find gradle plugin source code on your own development machine.

1. cd into your home dir
2. cd into .gradle/caches/modules-2/files-2.1/com.android.tools.build/gradle-core/
3. use a deep search tool (such as find) to look for a file with a name like 'gradle-core-2.3.1-sources.jar' (Note: the '2.3.1' in this example is only one possibility. You may have a different version. And there may be multiple versions on your machine.)

In other words, the downloaded plugin source jar files are stored by gradle down a path that looks something like:

~/.gradle/caches/modules-2/files-2.1/com.android.tools.build/gradle-core/2.3.1/59c72f62795f6ce6dd95c0b2e91c16dc16a1c8c7/gradle-core-2.3.1-sources.jar

(On your machine the hash and version in this path may be different.)

You can copy that jar file to another location and then unzip it to see the actual source files for the android gradle plugin:

./com/android/build/gradle/api/AndroidArtifactVariant.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/AndroidSourceDirectorySet.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/AndroidSourceFile.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/AndroidSourceSet.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/ApkOutputFile.java
./com/android/build/gradle/api/ApkVariant.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/ApkVariantOutput.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/ApplicationVariant.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/AtomVariant.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/AtomVariantOutput.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/BaseVariant.java ./com/android/build/gradle/api/BaseVariantOutput.java
. . .