Can I change the location of the .gradle directory?

Question

The first time you trigger a gradle task using gradle wrapper, it will create a .gradle folder in which a gradle distribution gets unzipped. Is there a way to change the location of that .gradle folder?

Setting the GRADLE_USER_HOME environment variable is not what I'm looking for. When you set GRADLE_USER_HOME to for example /c/temp, then it will indeed be downloading some stuff in there (a cache folder and others). But that then still creates a ".gradle" directory in my project folder. I'm looking for a way to change that last directory.

Our project is structured as follows:

ROOT
│   ...
├── backend
│   ├── src
│   │   └──...
│   └── build.gradle
├── lib
│   ├── src
│   │   └──...
│   └── build.gradle
├── gradle
│   └── wrapper
├── gradlew
├── gradlew.bat
├── settings.gradle

The .gradle folder which gets created the first time you run a gradle task is directly under the root folder. That's the one I'd like to control.

Why I want to do this? In our pipelines (on github), we're using several templates which we do not have under our control. There's a template to build the code, one to run a sonar scan, etc..
Those templates also cache certain folders. And that's the place where we're currently getting a warning when the pipeline is trying to upload folders to be cached. I'm trying to get rid of that warning: WARNING: backend/.gradle: no matching files.

In our project, the .gradle folder is not being created in the backend folder, but in the root folder. If I have a way to configure where the .gradle folder is being created, the warning would be gone.

The templates are trying to cache the following 2 folders:

• $GRADLE_USER_HOME/cache (that is working as we are setting the GRADLE_USER_HOME env variable to the project directory)
• $CI_PROJECT_DIR/$CONF_WORK_DIRECTORY/.gradle (this one causes the warning).

Answer 1

The answer is that you can not the project specific .gradle directory.

I was however able to change the structure of the project to achieve what I needed. Now, I do not have any gradle files anymore in the root directory. Each gradle project in the repository has it's own settings.gradle, build.gradle, gradlew.bat, gradlew files.

In each sub folder, I now have a .gradle folder auto generated when running any gradle task on a sub project.