Gradle Goodness: Getting More Help For a Task

To see which tasks are available for a Gradle project we can invoke the tasks task. With this task all tasks are printed to the console with their description. To get more information about a specific task we can use the Gradle help task with the command-line option --task followed by the task name. Gradle prints out the path, type, description, group and optional options for the task.

Let's run the help task for the wrapper task:

$ gradle help --task wrapper                   :help Detailed task information for wrapper   Path      :wrapper   Type      Wrapper (org.gradle.api.tasks.wrapper.Wrapper)   Options      --gradle-distribution-url     The URL to download the gradle distribution from.        --gradle-version     The version of the Gradle distribution required by the wrapper.   Description      Generates Gradle wrapper files. [incubating]   Group      Build Setup   BUILD SUCCESSFUL   Total time: 0.568 secs

Or use the help task to get more information about the help task:

$ gradle -q help --task help Detailed task information for help   Path      :help   Type      Help (org.gradle.configuration.Help)   Options      --task     The task to show help for.   Description      Displays a help message.   Group      help

Written with Gradle 2.7.