What’s Up? GradleUp!

We’re thrilled to announce a new place for community Gradle projects, the GradleUp organization!

GradleUp was created four years ago by a small team of passionate build tools authors looking for a place to distribute and maintain their plugins, libraries and tools. LouisCAD, tasomaniac, pablisco, jmfayard, deepy, martinbonnin, cortinico met on the KotlinLang slack and after a long naming discussion in a channel with a very very long name (#oss-org-naming-jmfy-pbc-nct-lc-anl-td-mb, naming is hard ;)), GradleUp was born!

Then, it took us only 2 years to rename the private channel. Yes, it takes an elephant about two years to give birth 🐘 :P

For a few years, the organization evolved mostly in the shadows(!). Code was written, releases were made. Besides the occasional droidcon or KotlinConf gathering, very little communication was made around the organization.

Fast forward to 2024 and the organization now hosts 9 projects and 11 members 🎉. oleg-nenashev just added a new logo, a new website at gradleup.com and helped structure the organization and initial governance. Goooler just took over the maintenance of the Shadow plugin! It was high time for a more formal introduction!

So, what’s GradleUp?

GradleUp (🐘🆙) is a volunteer-driven umbrella GitHub org focused on better Java, Kotlin and Android developer experience with Gradle.

Our main goal is to provide a welcoming place to host Gradle related community projects in a sustainable way. By using an organization account for GitHub, Maven Central and the Gradle plugin portal, it makes it very easy to update maintainers without having to rename projects or change distribution channels. The GradleUp team also adds redundancy, making sure that the bus factor is always greater than one. On top of that, it also provides a place to discuss and share ideas around Gradle, caching, project isolation, laziness and more (naming anyone?).

The organization has no legal entity. It is completely distributed and committed to open source. Each project maintainer receives complete admin rights on their projects and the structure is very light. Most decisions are made on a consensus basis in the public channels. You can read everything about it on the governance page.

We want the organization to help, not add friction! If you have a project you want to share with the Gradle community, join us!

Current Projects

The organization has just started, and now we host 11 Gradle plugins, including the following:

• Shadow creates fat/uber JARs, applies file transforms, and relocates packages for applications and libraries.

• Gr8 - Gr8 makes it easy to shadow, shrink, and minimize your jars.

• Gradle static analysis plugin - A Gradle plugin to easily apply the same setup of static analysis tools across different Android, Java or Kotlin projects.

• Gratatouille cooks delicious Gradle plugins using KSP.

• Librarian - Librarian is a library to help build Kotlin libraries.

• Maven Sympathy - A Gradle plugin to be nice with Maven consumers.

• NMCP publishes your libraries using the New Maven Central Portal.

• static-analysis-plugin: easy and consistent setup of static analysis tools for Android and Java project.

• Jaxb2 generates Java code from XML schema files.

You can find the full list in our GitHub organization.

Get involved

The more the merrier, contributors are welcome to all GradleUp projects! Hacktoberfest 2024 is also coming up soon, and we intend to add GradleUp as a featured project within Gradle’s Hacktoberfest initiative.

If you have feedback about individual projects, do not hesitate to open GitHub issues. For more informal discussions or general questions about the organization, there is also a public #gradleup channel in the Gradle community slack.

We’re also very open to adding new projects. If you have a project you’d like to host, please get in touch. You can read more about how to do this in the hosting page.

In all cases, feel free to contact us with any questions! Looking forward to seeing you online or at a nearby conference. Adventure is out there! ;)

The GradleUp team