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gradlew: What wrong can happen if gradle versions is not consistent

I am new to gradle. But I do understand to some extent why developers are encouraged to use gradlew instead of gradle. However what worse could happen if developers use different versions of gradle to build their project? At the end of the day any gradle version makes sure that dependencies of the project is managed properly. For example if a Spring Boot project is dependent of a starter plugin version 2.x, no matter what version of gradle is used, the build tool makes sure that 2.x is available

Solution

  • As far as I'm aware the main point to use a common version of Gradle is plugin compatibility.

    Gradle's internal APIs changed quite a lot in the last few versions, so not every plugin works with every Gradle version.

    For example: Spring Boot's 2.3.4 reference explicitly states that it's build plugin requires Gradle 6.3 or later (although 5.6 is mentioned to work in a deprecated form)

    https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/2.3.x/reference/htmlsingle/#getting-started-system-requirements

    So while you can be sure that the Spring Boot version is used (because you defined it in your buildfile) any older version of Gradle is likely to run into Exceptions when trying to build your project.

    Even if you're just using plugins that are provided by Gradle itself there can be compatibility issues. For example the java configuration block was first introduced in Gradle 5 (I think) and therefore would cause a syntax error in earlier versions. Or simple things like Java versions that older version of Gradle do not support.

    The more plugins you use it becomes increasingly unlikely that a lot of Gradle versions will be able to run it. Using the Gradle Wrapper is therefore a simple way that your build works for everyone.

    And from the other perspecitve: if you are the one that usually maintains the build you can use all the latest Gradle features using the Wrapper as you can be sure it will not break anything. Getting everyone on the team to update manually before you can use a feature can be a pain

    That beeing said, it's really primarly a maintenance issue. Nothing bad can happen if anyone uses their own installed version of gradle, except it might just not work If everyone on the team uses a similar version nothing might happen at all