Knowledge Base > Cover CLI > Building a Gradle project
Building a Gradle project
If your project uses the Gradle build system, cd
into the directory containing the build.gradle
file for the module you wish to build.
For a single-module project, this is typically located at the root of your repository. For a multi-module project, this may be within a sub-directory.
To compile the project, if a gradlew
(or gradlew.bat
on Windows) file is present, run the ./gradlew build
command, otherwise run gradle build
.
It is generally preferable to execute Gradle commands using ./gradlew
(or gradlew.bat
on Windows) rather than gradle
if these Gradle wrapper scripts are present in your project.
In either case, if successful, you should see a BUILD SUCCESSFUL
message towards the end of the output from Gradle:
BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 15s
7 actionable tasks: 2 executed, 5 up-to-date
In order to run Diffblue Cover CLI it is essential that your Gradle project builds successfully. If it finds a Gradle project, Cover will call Gradle to determine your project settings. If your Gradle project fails then Cover will exit with an error message (and reason):
ERROR An error was encountered while building the Gradle project at ...
If there is a Gradle wrapper for your project (gradlew
, gradlew.bat
), Cover will use the wrapper’s declared version in preference to your system’s installed Gradle version.
Gradle and user-specified system properties
The -D
or --define
option allows the user to pass additional system properties to dcover
for test creation and execution.
Any created tests may depend upon these user-specified system properties and may not execute successfully without them.
Unfortunately by default Gradle
does not forward command line system properties to test execution. Therefore out-of-the-box dcover
may fail to validate your tests
.
You can overcome this issue with additional configuration. If you have supplied these system properties to dcover
:
dcover create -Dproperty1=value1 -Dproperty2=value2
Then you must also supply those same system properties to Gradle
test execution before running dcover create
.
Specify your system properties in the test
task:
test {
systemProperty 'property1', 'value1'
systemProperty 'property2', 'value2'
}
Keeping these properties in sync will ensure that test validation
will succeed and that your created tests can be executed successfully from Gradle
.
Gradle Troubleshooting
JUnit Platform Launcher jar
dcover
relies upon the JUnit Platform Launcher jar to verify created tests. Without this jar dcover
will not be able to verify that created tests execute successfully in your build environment. You may see this warning message if the launcher jar is not available from your test configuration:
13:11:32.487 INFO Checking test environment...
13:11:39.515 ERROR E011: Problems in the local build environment have been detected that will prevent Diffblue Cover from validating the generated tests.
To prevent this issue you must configure your build.gradle
to supply the corresponding junit-platform-launcher
for your JUnit engine at test runtime:
dependencies {
testImplementation("org.junit.jupiter:junit-jupiter-api:5.7.1")
testRuntimeOnly("org.junit.jupiter:junit-jupiter-engine:5.7.1")
testRuntimeOnly("org.junit.platform:junit-platform-launcher:1.7.1")
}
In the example above 1.7.1
is the correct version of the platform launcher for the 5.7.1
version of the engine. See the JUnit user guide for further details about this.
Checkstyle Plugin
If dcover
cannot verify the tests it creates due to an incompatibility with the stylecheck used in your environment, you will receive an error message.
If your project uses the Gradle Checkstyle plugin (https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/checkstyle_plugin.html), amend the build.gradle
file to exclude Diffblue tests, as shown in the example below:
tasks.withType(Checkstyle) {
exclude '**/*DiffblueTest**'
}
The -g option
The -g option is needed for Diffblue Cover to write the best tests possible. If you have switched off the -g option, please switch it back on again. For Gradle documentation, please see: https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.tasks.compile.CompileOptions.html#org.gradle.api.tasks.compile.CompileOptions:debug