Selecting Java for Gradle?

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1

I wonder how people selects Java version for Gradle…

During the upgrade to Spring Boot 6.0 I discovered Spring guys put hard dependency for Java 17 to Gradle if you want to load Boot Gradle plugin!

Now there are options:

  • to load Gradle with latest Java at the moment, so bytecode of any lib will be accepted.
  • update env var JAVA_HOME
  • update org.gradle.java.home in ~/.gradle/gradle.properties

I think about the first as the most convenient, except that legacy build of Java 8 / Java 11 need to be rewritten to use new Gradle’s concept: toolchains ((

I never used SDKMan, nor Jabba / Asdf so cannot tell how well it integrates with Gradle in case of Java switching.

There is no problem to set Java version in Idea. I suffered only in Bash.

For Cygwin / mintty / Bash I updated my utility:

http://hg.defun.work/utils/file/tip/misc/mygradle.bash

that extract a number from the symlinks (like mygradle17) and searches for Java path in ~/.m2/toolchains.xml then set JAVA_HOME env var and exec to Gradle, so the final user contract looks like:

mygradle8  bootJar
mygradle11 help
mygradle17 tasks

Note that toolchains are not the answer, as the question is not about compiling but invoking Gradle itself with the correct runtime + about support of legacy scripts.