Gradle equivelant of maven repository management paramenter - maven

Question

When building with Gradle I would like to reuse the maven repository I created in the past for dependency management, it is basically working, but I cannot find out answers for below questions from Gralde official document:
Does Gradle reuse my settings.xml from default location (my home folder) during maven dependency resolution?
How could I specify a repository in Gradle instead of using the default one? I can do it in maven command with -Drepository parameter easily.
How to control the update policy? I mean always update snapshot dependency and update release dependency per week something like this, or is my setting in settings.xml takes effect to Gradle as well?
Thanks in advance.
B.R.

Answer 1

My answers below are based on the following chapters from gradle user guide:
8. DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT BASICS
51. DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT
Now, to the specific answers:
According to DEPENDENCY MANAGEMENT BASICS (section 51.6.4. Local Maven repository), I guess the answer to this question would be yes:
Gradle uses the same logic as Maven to identify the location of your
local Maven cache. If a local repository location is defined in a
settings.xml, this location will be used. The settings.xml in
USER_HOME/.m2 takes precedence over the settings.xml in M2_HOME/conf.
If no settings.xml is available, Gradle uses the default location
USER_HOME/.m2/repository.
This applies to local repository defined as:
repositories {
mavenLocal()
}
Sections 8.5. Repositories and 51.6. Repositories in gradle user guide describes a couple of ways to define the repositories you'd like to use. these includes using mavenCentral, specifying a remote custom Maven repository, e.g.: maven { url "http://repo.mycompany.com/maven2" }, etc. If you'd like to pass the repository via command line then you can use gradle system property for that.
I believe that section 51.9. THE DEPENDENCY CACHE contains the information you're looking for. In short, the default cache is for 24 hours. However, it can be overridden configuring the ResolutionStrategy, e.g.: resolutionStrategy.cacheDynamicVersionsFor 10, 'minutes'.
Regarding using the settings in settings.xml then I could not find a clear answer for that but you're welcome to give it a try :)