Building spring with gradle - spring

Question

I am learning to use git and gradle to build Spring 3.2 on my local system.
I cloned the git repo and used the gradlew command to start the build like so:
gradlew build
I also have the GRADLE_HOME set up and added GRADLE_HOME/bin to my PATH variable.
Every time I start up the build I see a .gradle directory being created in my directory C:\Users\Ayusman and it seems to download gradle binaries.
My questions:
Since I already have gradle installed on my system; why does it have to download gradle?
Can I force gradle to put my dependencies in a specific directory instead of the users folder (like I can specify in maven)?
Can gradle be pointed to pull from a local repo instead of internet?

Answer 1

ad 1. In order to build with your locally installed Gradle, you have to invoke gradle rather than gradlew. The purpose of gradlew (called the Gradle Wrapper) is for everybody to use the same Gradle version and not having to install Gradle manually.
ad 2. To change where Gradle puts dependencies (and other global information), you can set the GRADLE_USER_HOME environment variable.
ad 3. You just need to add another repository declaration to build.gradle. Something like:
allprojects {
repositories {
maven {
url "http://..."
}
}
}
If you want to use this repository for all your builds, you can put the same declaration into ~/.gradle/init.gradle.

Answer 2

Because gradlew invokes the gradle wrapper, which downloads the version of gradle that the build script has been written for, instead of using your version, which might not be compatible. It does that only once, and then reuses the downloaed version. If you want to use your version of gradle, use the gradle command rather than gradlew, but it might not work if you don't have the appropriate version.
AFAIK, this is done by defining the GRADLE_USER_HOME environment variable.
See http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/userguide_single.html#sec:repositories