Streamlining AEM Instance Setup and Incremental Builds with Gradle AEM Plugin | AEM Community Blog Seeding

[#1]

Streamlining AEM Instance Setup and Incremental Builds with Gradle AEM Plugin by Kiran Sg

Abstract

Problem Statement:
How to set up an AEM instance in one click?

Can I perform incremental builds on the Maven project?

Introduction:
Gradle AEM Plugin (GAP) developed by Wunderman Thompson Technology uses Gradle as a building tool.

Advantages of Gradle:
1. Flexibility

2. Performance

Incrementality — tracks the tasks, watches file changes and runs only what is necessary.
Build Cache — Reuses the build outputs of any other Gradle build with the same inputs.
Gradle Daemon — A long-lived process that keeps building information “hot” in memory.
3. User experience

How to get started?
Step 1: Create the project outside the Desktop, Documents and Downloads folder to avoid all kinds of setup issues.

Step 2: Create a new project structure using an AEM archetype (using the latest archetype of the below example) you can also run on your current project if it follows the Adobe archetype

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Streamlining AEM Instance Setup and Incremental Builds with Gradle AEM Plugin

Q&A

Please use this thread to ask the related questions.

[#2]

Thank you for sharing. This blog has been incredibly helpful.

[#3]

So it is not a replacement for maven, just for starting local AEM & watching for changes to redeploy? As I see, there are both `build.gradle` and maven's pom.xml... At this point, the AEM CLI that I use seems to be simpler for those tasks, although it doesn't have a GUI version. It's also IDE-agnostic.

As I know, Gradle builds faster and can provide really incremental builds, so It would be better to have a solution to convert the existing maven configuration to the Gradle one and use it to speed up the build processes.

I remember times when Adobe tried to use Lazybones (build on Gradle as I know) as a template provider, but it didn't work well so was retired.

Does anybody know if Adobe does have plans to leverage somehow Gradle? Maybe not as a replacement for the current aem maven archetype but as an analogous modern solution developed parallelly?