Why Is My Gradle Build in Docker So Slow?
Updated: Jun 3, 2021
Why is my gradle build in docker so slow? I’ve asked myself this question often recently. Building outside of docker is quick, so what gives?
Docker caches each of its steps in a layer. So if a given step hasn’t changed, it’s cached, and should make the image build quickly. So why wasn’t this happening for gradle builds?
In the original Dockerfile, when the gradle build was run, it would re-download all dependencies each time. This was the cause of the slowness.
The solution was to cache the downloaded dependencies. Unfortunately, gradle doesn’t have a built-in task to only download dependencies, but I worked around this.
Now the dependencies are only downloaded if dependency-related files are changed. Otherwise, the dependency cache is used, and only the source code is built.
Before #
FROM gradle:6.2.1-jdk11
RUN gradle --version && java -version
WORKDIR /app
COPY ./ /app/
RUN gradle clean build --no-daemon
CMD java -jar build/libs/*.jar
After #
FROM gradle:6.2.1-jdk11
RUN gradle --version && java -version
WORKDIR /app
# Only copy dependency-related files
COPY build.gradle gradle.properties settings.gradle /app/
# Only download dependencies
# Eat the expected build failure since no source code has been copied yet
RUN gradle clean build --no-daemon > /dev/null 2>&1 || true
# Copy all files
COPY ./ /app/
# Do the actual build
RUN gradle clean build --no-daemon
CMD java -jar build/libs/*.jar
Bonus #
At least the following items should be included in your .dockerignore file, so that they’re not unnecessarily sent to the docker build context.
.gradle/
bin/
build/
gradle/