Chapter 4. Plugin Management

In the last chapter, we discussed Gradle task, which is the atomic unit of execution in Gradle. In most cases, a task provides only a single unit of work in modules. We can choose to bundle tasks together and execute them in a certain order to provide the complete functionality. This grouping of tasks along with properties and configuration is called a plugin. A plugin is the logical grouping of tasks, which may have a life cycle. You can configure plugins to alter the behavior based on the requirements. You can extend it to provide additional features. At a broader level, Gradle provides two types of plugins; script plugin and binary plugin. Gradle treats a build script as a script plugin and you can use other build scripts in a project by importing build scripts into the current project.

Binary plugins are plugins, that we create using programming languages such as Java or Groovy. Gradle provides in-built binary plugins for different build functionalities...