Android Development: A Record of Wrestling with Gradle

Preface

A bit annoying. I recently upgraded my computer, adding RAM and an SSD, but the new RAM wasn't very compatible and caused frequent crashes. After I went to the seller and swapped the RAM stick, it was fine, but that also led me to rashly reinstall the system = =... I had some files on the system drive that I forgot to save, so they were lost. I only finished setting up the new system this afternoon, so I haven't been able to write posts these past two days. (Gotta say Chrome is really useful; the sync feature saved me a lot of trouble.)

First, a rant about Gradle

Downsides: It eats a lot of resources, is slow, and the network is even worse when using it in China. This afternoon while setting up the environment, this thing wasted a ton of my time. At first the Gradle files wouldn't download; after I downloaded them manually, the dependency packages wouldn't download. I was so done. I spent ages hunting for mirrors and downloading things by hand and still couldn't get it working. (No experience.) You ask why I didn't use a proxy?? What? I did set a SOCKS proxy, but it completely ignored me—the places that wouldn't download still wouldn't download, and the Maven repos still didn't work. I won't ramble on any further; here's the solution: The correct way to set a proxy is like this—edit gradle.properties:

Location of this file: Linux/Mac: ~/.gradle/gradle.properties Windows: C:\Users\你的用户名\.gradle\gradle.properties

I'll eat my words if setting a SOCKS proxy actually works. Also, you MUST set https!

systemProp.http.proxyHost=127.0.0.1
systemProp.http.proxyPort=1080
systemProp.https.proxyHost=127.0.0.1
systemProp.https.proxyPort=1080

After setting the proxy, run ./gradlew build in the Project Root and there shouldn't be much of a problem. If there are errors, just follow the messages to fix them. I prefer using the command line; it's more straightforward than an IDE.

Optimizing Gradle Speed

Gradle's poor performance is well known. How to fix it? Throw hardware at it, you want to get stronger without paying? Enough talk—just edit this gradle.properties:

org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.configureondemand=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

And also configure it in the IDE:

emmmm

Yeah, that's about it for this Gradle configuration. Now I get a bit anxious whenever I see that word—somehow it brings back the fear of being dominated by Gradle. I'm out~