Difference between using gradlew and gradle

Gradle tasks are run with either the gradle or gradlew commands.

Gradlew is a gradle wrapper for the gradle command.

This tutorial talks about the difference between gradlew and gradle command.

#What you can do with Gradle command?

if your machine has a gradle installation, Then the gradle command works as seen below.

It gives Gradle version installed on a local machine.

C:\>gradle

> Task :help

Welcome to Gradle 6.0.1.

To run a build, run Gradle <task> ...

To see a list of available tasks, run Gradle tasks

To see a list of command-line options, run gradle --help

To see more detail about a task, run gradle help --task <task>

For troubleshooting, visit https://help.gradle.org

Deprecated Gradle features were used in this build, making it incompatible with Gradle 7.0.
Use '--warning-mode all' to show the individual deprecation warnings.
See https://docs.gradle.org/6.0.1/userguide/command_line_interface.html#sec:command_line_warnings

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 1s
1 actionable task: 1 executed

Gradle installed on a local machine, you can do the following things.

• You can create a new project using the below command

gradle init

It creates a new project by asking for input from users on the type of project, build a script

B:\kiranw>gradle init

Select the type of project to generate:
  1: basic
  2: application
  3: library
  4: Gradle plugin
Enter selection (default: basic) [1..4]


Select build script DSL:
  1: Groovy
  2: Kotlin
Enter selection (default: Groovy) [1..2]

Project name (default: kiranw):

> Task :init
Get more help with your project: https://guides.gradle.org/creating-new-gradle-builds.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 1m 4s
2 actionable tasks: 2 executed

• You can add a wrapper with the gradle command to the project

gradle wrapper --gradle-version 7.1.1

• You can run a list of the tasks of a Gradle

gradle tasks

• you can run build or test the project using the below command

gradle test
gradle build

#Gradle wrapper

The gradle wrapper command is run by using ./gradlew command in Linux and gradlew in windows. gradle wrapper can be added using the below command

gradle wrapper --gradle-version 7.1.1

It is part of a Gradle project with a specific version installed.

It does the following things in a project.

• Checks whether Gradle exists or not, if not inline installation with the correct Gradle version
• Call gradle tasks

gradle-wrapper.properties contain the gradle wrapper configuration information

gradle wrapper commands add the wrapper to the gradle project and the following is a project structure.

└── <project folder>
    └── gradlew
    └── gradlew.bat
    └── build.gradle
    └──
    └──
    └── gradle
        └── wrapper
            └── gradle-wrapper.jar
            └── gradle-wrapper.properties

#Comparision of gradle and gradlew commands

#Conclusion

In this tutorial, Learned the difference between gradlew and gradle command.

Both are the same and equal except initializing and adding a wrapper is not possible with a Gradle wrapper.