How To Install Gradle on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gradle on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Gradle is a free and open-source build automation toolset based on the concepts of Apache Ant and Apache Maven. Gradle provides a platform to support the entire development lifecycle of a software project.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Gradle on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Gradle on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Java.

Gradle requires Java to be installed on your server. By default, Java is not available in Ubuntu’s repository. Add the Oracle Java PPA to Apt with the following command:

add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
apt-get update -y
apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Verify the Java version by running the following command:

java -version

Step 3. Installing Gradle on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Run the commands below to download Gradle, At the time of this writing, the version is 4.10.2:

wget https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-4.10.2-bin.zip -P /tmp

Now extract the downloaded archive using the following command:

sudo unzip -d /opt/gradle /tmp/gradle-*.zip

Step 4. Configure Ubuntu Environment Variables.

You can do that by running the commands below to create a new file called gradle.sh in the /etc/profile.d directory:

sudo nano /etc/profile.d/gradle.sh

Paste the following configuration:

export GRADLE_HOME=/opt/gradle/gradle-4.10.2
export PATH=${GRADLE_HOME}/bin:${PATH}

When you’re done, run the commands below to make the file executable:

sudo chmod +x /etc/profile.d/gradle.sh
source /etc/profile.d/gradle.sh

Step 5. Verify the Gradle installation.

You can run the following command to check if the Gradle install was successful:

gradle -v

You should see the following output:

------------------------------------------------------------
Gradle 4.10.2
------------------------------------------------------------

Build time:   2018-11-11 18:46:15 UTC
Revision:     b4d8d5d170bb4ba5ramona88d7fe5647e2323d791dd

Kotlin DSL:   1.0-rc-8
Kotlin:       1.2.61
Groovy:       2.4.15
Ant:          Apache Ant(TM) version 1.9.11 compiled on May 18 2018
JVM:          1.8.0_181 (Oracle Corporation 25.181-b13)
OS:           Linux 4.15.0-46-generic amd64

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Gradle. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Gradle on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Gradle website.