Basic Configuration
Demonstrate commonly used configurations
Demonstrate commonly used configurations
A SourceSet is a group of source files that are to be compiled together. You can find more information about sourceSets here.
A Configuration is collection of dependencies in the form of files (JAR files) that your project depends on. It can also consist of artifacts which are the outputs when you build the configuration. The dependencies can be thought of as the inputs and the artifacts can be thought of as the outputs.
Configurations can extend other configurations which mean that they inherit the collection of dependencies (and artifacts) of their parents.
The most common configuration is compile which you be using most of the time when specifying dependencies.
You can find more information about configurations here and here.
A Task does the actual work in your build. Tasks can depend on other tasks. For example, a task that generates source code will be depended on by a task that compiles the source code. Your build execution works by running tasks in dependency order.
You can demand that a task be executed by supplying it as an argument to the gradle command, like so
$ ./gradlew compileEta
and Gradle will run all the tasks that compileEta depends on in dependency order followed by the task itself.
All the build.gradle files in your project are evaluated (since they are just Groovy source code) into a Project object which stores all the information about the build. The full lifecycle of evaluation is documented here.
Plugins are code that are run against a Project object to customize the evaluation of the Project. You can find more information about plugins here.
Once all the projects in your build have been fully evaluated, Gradle will construct a task graph and will execute the tasks in dependency order. You can read more about the build cycle here.