How to reference latest Gradle 3.0 nightly build

If you visit the NIGHTLY BUILD page, it tells you how you can manually test against a 3.0 nightly build.

However, for JUnit 5’s builds, we would like to automate testing against Gradle 3.0 nightly builds.

So my question is…

Is there any way to automatically reference the latest nightly build?

Ideally, the Gradle team could create a symbolic link like the following on their server to make this possible.

https://services.gradle.org/distributions-snapshots/gradle-3.0-NIGHTLY-BUILD-bin.zip

Does something like that already exist?

2 Likes

Sort of, you can get the latest available nightly by hitting the following URL.

http://services.gradle.org/versions/nightly

It’s not quite the same as a static URL that could be put in a gradle-wrapper.properties file but with some CI trickery combined with gradle wrapper --gradle-version you could probably automate this.

3 Likes

Thanks for the tips!

We are now building against 3.0 GA, but we’ll keep your tips in mind the next time we need to build against nightly snapshots.

This is for master, is there something similar for the current release branch?

@idlsoft At the moment we do not produce nightly builds for the release branch.

It would be very helpful, I think. Would improve the turnaround during the release cycle.

1 Like

@idlsoft I can only think of a single use case where this would be helpful: for verifying if a bug was fixed before another RC has been released. Is that your use case?

That’s exactly it. New RCs are released in one week intervals, the bug I reported has been fixed 2 days after RC2,
I tried the nightly build, hoping that all fixes going to the release branch automatically get merged into master.
That’s not the case, unfortunately, so I’m stuck, and have to wait for the next RC to continue my testing.
Building locally is not an option, because of a firewall.

As @bmuschko mentioned, we don’t publish nightlies from the release branch. We can however manually create a snapshot release. I’ve gone ahead and done this so you can test this latest fix.

https://services.gradle.org/distributions-snapshots/gradle-3.4-20170209200339+0000-bin.zip

I suppose we could start doing nightlies. We’d have to potentially tweak some stuff on our end to ensure we only publish release branch snapshots while the branch is “active” but that probably wouldn’t be too difficult.

Thank you very much, that’s very helpful.