How do I upgrade Gradle?

This shows that Gradle is up to date:

thufir@doge:~$ sudo apt install gradle
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
gradle is already the newest version (2.10-1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 629 not upgraded.

How do I upgrade to Gradle 4.x? Preferably, with umake rather than SDKMAN! which seems to be what they suggest.

(I don't want to update all the packages due to a slow connection.)

3 Answers

You could use the ppa for the almost-always latest version

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cwchien/gradle
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt upgrade gradle

or SDKMAN for the latest version

curl -s "" | bash
source "$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh"
sdk install gradle

Advantages of the ppa

• auto-updates with the system
• no piping of downloaded scripts to the shell

Advantages of sdkman: latest version supplied by gradle themselves.

You can also tell Gradle to update itself using a Gradle wrapper.

First you create the wrapper, then tell it to use the Gradle version of your choice:

gradle wrapper
./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 4.9

Now this project will use Gradle 4.9, independent of what's installed. However, you need to remember to run Gradle through the wrapper, i.e., run ./gradlew instead of plain gradle.

The wrapper allows you to have different projects using different Gradle versions easily.

When you commit the created wrapper to source control, everybody who checks out the project will use the same Gradle version. This can help a lot with incompatible build scripts, when something has changed between Gradle versions.

download from

pick the binary-only link as per

v4.10.3

Dec 05, 2018

Download: binary-only or complete

after you expand the download just update your PATH env var to pickup this new binary

vi ~/.bashrc # or where ever your shell's env vars are defined

and add following line to bottom of ~/.bashrc

# replace ~/src/gradle-4.10.3/bin with your location
export PATH=~/src/gradle-4.10.3/bin:$PATH

confirm this works by issuing

source ~/.bashrc
gradle --version