Update Gradle Wrapper Action

This action keeps the Gradle Wrapper script in your projects up-to-date to the latest release.

Schedule an automatic daily or weekly workflow: as soon as a new Gradle release is available, the action will open a PR ready to be merged. It's like Dependabot for Gradle Wrapper. 🤖✨

Table of Contents

• Usage
• Why shoud I use this action?
• Action inputs
  • repo-token
  • reviewers
  • team-reviewers
  • labels
  • base-branch
  • target-branch
  • paths
  • paths-ignore
  • set-distribution-checksum
  • release-channel
• Examples
  • Scheduling action execution
  • Targeting a custom branch
  • Updating to the latest Release Candidate version
  • Ignoring subprojects folders with paths-ignore
  • Using paths and paths-ignore together
• FAQ
  • Running CI workflows in Pull Requests created by the action
  • Android Studio warning about distributionSha256Sum
• Debugging
• License

Usage

Create a new dedicated workflow file:

.github/workflows/update-gradle-wrapper.yml

Paste this configuration:

name: Update Gradle Wrapper

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 * * *"

jobs:
  update-gradle-wrapper:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Update Gradle Wrapper
        uses: gradle-update/update-gradle-wrapper-action@v1

The action will run every day around midnight, check if a new Gradle version is available and create a Pull Request to update the Gradle Wrapper script.

Check the detailed description of action inputs and some more usage examples.

Why should I use this action?

Gradle Wrapper is the recommended way to setup Gradle in your project. The Wrapper is a script that downloads and invokes a declared Gradle version. By checking the Wrapper into version control you make the build process more standardised, easy and reliable.

Maintaining dependencies up-to-date is regarded as a good practice, and the build system files should be no exception. Unfortunately, often times developers add the Wrapper to the project repository once and just forget about it.

The Update Gradle Wrapper Action aims to help keeping Gradle projects on GitHub polished to high standards and to strengthen the software supply chain in the Gradle ecosystem.

Hygiene

Gradle is under heavy development, with new releases available every few weeks. Projects that stick to old Wrapper versions can't benefit from the tons of features and bug fixes being rolled out.

Updating the build system only once or twice per year might become a tedious task. You will need to walk through longer changelogs and handle any breaking change. Updating frequently helps do less work, take advantage of new features earlier and safely drop deprecated functionality.

This action runs automatically at the declared schedule and creates Pull Requests with detailed information about the version update.

Security

At the hearth of the Gradle Wrapper script is a .jar binary blob of executable code. Checking that blob into a repository makes the developer experience quite convenient but has important security implications.

A gradle-wrapper.jar that has been tampered with could execute or fetch any arbitrary code. Pull Requests that update the Wrapper are genuinely hard to review, as GitHub will show an empty binary diff.

This action verifies the integrity of the gradle-wrapper.jar file being updated by comparing its SHA-256 checksum against the official checksum value published by Gradle authors. Moreover, the action configures the Wrapper so that the Gradle executable itself can be verified once it is downloaded locally.

Action inputs

This is the list of supported inputs:

Name	Description	Required	Default
repo-token	GITHUB_TOKEN or a Personal Access Token (PAT) with repo scope.	No	GITHUB_TOKEN
reviewers	List of users to request a review from (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)
team-reviewers	List of teams to request a review from (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)
labels	List of labels to set on the Pull Request (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)
base-branch	Base branch where the action will run and update the Gradle Wrapper.	No	The default branch name of your repository.
target-branch	Branch to create the Pull Request against.	No	The default branch name of your repository.
paths	List of paths where to search for Gradle Wrapper files (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)
paths-ignore	List of paths to be excluded when searching for Gradle Wrapper files (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)
set-distribution-checksum	Whether to set the distributionSha256Sum property.	No	true
release-channel	Which Gradle release channel to use: either stable or release-candidate.	No	stable

---

repo-token

Name	Description	Required	Default
repo-token	GITHUB_TOKEN or a Personal Access Token (PAT) with repo scope.	No	GITHUB_TOKEN

Set the authorisation token used by the action to perform tasks through the GitHub API and to execute authenticated git commands.

If empty, it defaults to the GITHUB_TOKEN that is installed in your repository, which is equivalent to the following configuration:

with:
  repo-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Note that, when using the GITHUB_TOKEN, Pull Requests created by the Update Gradle Wrapper action cannot trigger any workflow run in your repository. This is a restriction of GitHub Actions to avoid accidentally creating recursive workflow runs (read more).

So, for example, if you have any on: pull_request or on: push workflow that runs CI checks on Pull Requests, they won't be triggered if the repo-token is left empty or if you set it to GITHUB_TOKEN.

The recommended workaround is to create a Personal Access Token (PAT) with repo scope and add it as a secret into your repository. Then, set the repo-token to access your secret PAT:

with:
  repo-token: ${{ secrets.GRADLE_UPDATE_PAT }}

Read this paragraph for more details on the topic.

---

reviewers

Name	Description	Required	Default
reviewers	List of users to request a review from (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)

Request a review from these GitHub usernames (notifications will be triggered).

For example, use a comma-separated list:

with:
  reviewers: username1, username2

or add each reviewer on a different line (no comma needed):

with:
  reviewers: |
    username1
    username2

Note that if you're using a Personal Access Token (PAT) as repo-token you cannot request a review from the user that the PAT belongs to.

---

team-reviewers

Name	Description	Required	Default
team-reviewers	List of teams to request a review from (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)

Request a review from these teams (notifications will be triggered).

For example, use a comma-separated list:

with:
  team-reviewers: team1, team2

or add each team on a different line (no comma needed):

with:
  team-reviewers: |
    team1
    team2

Note that you might need to use a Personal Access Token (PAT) as repo-token in order to request a review from a team in your organisation.

---

labels

Name	Description	Required	Default
labels	List of labels to set on the Pull Request (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)

Add custom labels to the Pull Request.

For example, use a comma-separated list:

with:
  labels: automated pr, dependencies

or add each label on a different line (no comma needed):

with:
  labels: |
    automated pr
    dependencies

Label names can include spaces. Note that the action will create a label if it doesn't already exist within your organisation.

---

base-branch

Name	Description	Required	Default
base-branch	Base branch where the action will run and update the Gradle Wrapper.	No	The default branch name of your repository.

The name of the branch used as a base when running the update process. The action will switch (i.e. git checkout) to this branch before updating the gradle-wrapper.jar file. By default the repository's "default branch" is used (most commonly master).

with:
  base-branch: gradle-testing

---

target-branch

Name	Description	Required	Default
target-branch	Branch to create Pull Requests against.	No	The default branch name of your repository.

The name of the branch to push changes into. By default the repository's "default branch" is used (most commonly master).

For example:

with:
  target-branch: unstable

---

paths

Name	Description	Required	Default
paths	List of paths where to search for Gradle Wrapper files (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)

By default all Gradle Wrapper files in the source tree will be autodiscovered and considered for update. Use paths to provide a specific list of paths where to look for gradle-wrapper.jar.

For example, use a comma-separated list:

with:
  paths: project-web/**, project-backend/**

or add each path on a different line (no comma needed):

with:
  paths: |
    project-web/**
    project-backend/**

This input accepts glob patterns that use characters like * and **, for more information see GitHub's cheat sheet.

paths and paths-ignore can be used together. paths is always evaluated before paths-ignore, look at this example.

---

paths-ignore

Name	Description	Required	Default
paths-ignore	List of paths to be excluded when searching for Gradle Wrapper files (comma or newline-separated).	No	(empty)

By default all Gradle Wrapper files in the source tree will be autodiscovered and considered for update. Use paths-ignore to specify paths that should be ignored during scan.

For example, use a comma-separated list:

with:
  paths-ignore: project-docs/**, project-examples/**

or add each path on a different line (no comma needed):

with:
  paths-ignore: |
    project-docs/**
    project-examples/**

This input accepts glob patterns that use characters like * and **, for more information see GitHub's cheat sheet.

paths and paths-ignore can be used together. paths-ignore is always evaluated after paths, look at this example.

---

set-distribution-checksum

Name	Description	Required	Default
set-distribution-checksum	Whether to set the distributionSha256Sum property.	No	true

The Gradle Wrapper provides a way to increase security against attackers tampering with the Gradle distribuition file you download locally. If the distributionSha256Sum property is added to gradle-wrapper.properties, Gradle will report a build failure in case the specified checksum doesn't match the checksum of the distribution downloaded from server (this is only performed once, the first time you download a new Gradle version).

The Update Gradle Wrapper action sets the expected checksum for you. If you want to disable this behaviour change the set-distribution-checksum input to false.

It is not recommended to change this value unless you've got a very specific need (e.g. Android Studio warnings).

For example:

with:
  set-distribution-checksum: false

---

release-channel

Name	Description	Required	Default
release-channel	Which release channel to use: stable or release-candidate.	No	stable

Gradle's release channel used to update. By default stable is used which corresponds to the latest stable release. Alternatively, release-candidate can be used to update to the most recent release candidate.

For example:

with:
  release-channel: release-candidate

Examples

Scheduling action execution

You should run this action on a dedicated workflow using a schedule trigger event:

on:
  schedule:
    # every day at 2am
    - cron: "0 2 * * *"

or

on:
  schedule:
    # every week on Monday at 8am
    - cron: "0 8 * * MON"

Use the POSIX cron syntax to specify your preferred time or frequency (tip: check your value is correct with crontab guru).

It is not recommended to run the action more frequently than once a day.

Targeting a custom branch

The action will create Pull Requests against the "default branch" of your repository (say, master or any other branch you've configured).

If you want Pull Requests to be created against a non-default branch use the target-branch input:

with:
  target-branch: v2-dev

Updating to the latest Release Candidate version

The action supports more Gradle release channels. By default, when the action runs it will check for the latest stable release. If your project depends on the release candidate version of Gradle, use release-channel to configure which release information to download:

with:
  release-channel: release-candidate

Ignoring subprojects folders with paths-ignore

There are cases where your repository contains folders for projects or subprojects that need to be kept at an older Gradle version.

If you want to ignore such files when the action runs, use paths-ignore to configure project paths that contain Gradle Wrapper files that should not be updated.

with:
  paths-ignore: examples/**

Using paths and paths-ignore together

paths and paths-ignore works as allowlist and blocklist systems. The evaluation rule is as follows:

• the source tree is searched for all gradle-wrapper.jar files and the list is passed to the next step
• if paths is not empty, the paths that match the specified patterns are passed to the next step
• if paths-ignore is not empty, the paths that match the specified patterns are removed from the list

For example, the following configuration will srarch for Gradle Wrapper files in the sub-project directory and its subdirectories, but not in the sub-project/examples directory.

with:
  paths: sub-project/**
  paths-ignore: sub-project/examples/**

FAQ

Running CI workflows in Pull Requests created by the action

By default, if the repo-token input is left empty or if you set it to GITHUB_TOKEN, Pull Requests created by the Update Gradle Wrapper action do not trigger any other workflow. So, for example, if you have any on: pull_request or on: push workflow that runs CI checks on Pull Requests, they won't normally be triggered.

This is a restriction imposed by GitHub Actions to avoid accidentally creating recursive workflow runs (read more).

Here is what you can do to trigger additional workflows:

• Manual trigger: when you use the default GITHUB_TOKEN the Pull Request won't run any of the configured workflows, but you can manually close and immediately reopen the Pull Request to trigger the on: pull_request workflows.

• Use a Personal Access Token: create a PAT with the repo scope and add it as a secret into your repository. Then configure the repo-token input to use such encrypted secret. Note that the Pull Request author will be set to the GitHub user that the PAT belongs to: as Pull Request author, this user cannot be assigned as reviewer and cannot approve it.

• Use a Personal Access Token of a dedicated account: use a PAT that belongs to a machine account with collaborator access to your repository.

Android Studio warning about distributionSha256Sum

You might get a warning message in Android Studio that looks like this:

It is not fully supported to define distributionSha256Sum in gradle-wrapper.properties.

This refers to the presence of the distributionSha256Sum property into gradle-wrapper.properties, which Update Gradle Wrapper action sets by default to increase security against the risk of the Gradle distribution being tampered with.

It is totally safe to disable the warning in Android Studio, just choose the option:

Use "..." as checksum for https://.../gradle-6.6.1-bin.zip and sync project

On the other hand, if for some reason you prefer to avoid the distributionSha256Sum property being set automatically by the action use the set-distribution-checksum:

with:
  # not recommended
  set-distribution-checksum: false

Debugging

Debug logs are disabled by default in GitHub actions. To see any debug output in the workflow execution logs, add a secret named ACTIONS_STEP_DEBUG with value true in your repository.

License

The Update Gradle Wrapper Action is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.