~/.gradle/gradle.properties file not being read

A quick and dirty solution is just to simply put the gradle.properties right next to your build.gradle, that will guarantee it will be read. I realize this doesn't solve a single centralized source of common properties, but at least it's something.

By default, without setting GRADLE_USER_HOME, it should work. I tested it in v3.5.

But make sure if your are running it as the right user. For ex, if you do your ./gradlew build using sudo, then gradle.properties in your home folder will not be picked up.

To make sure the default gradle user home, you can run gradle with the --debug option and look out for the below line,

[DEBUG] [org.gradle.internal.buildevents.BuildLogger] Gradle user home:

The problem was that I made an assumption that wasn't true. If you look at section 14.2 of the gradle documentation, it says:

You can place a gradle.properties file in the Gradle user home directory (defined by the “GRADLE_USER_HOME” environment variable, which if not set defaults to USER_HOME/.gradle) or in your project directory.

My incorrect assumption was that USER_HOME just defaulted to the standard linux HOME environment variable. This is not true.

As soon as I export USER_HOME=$HOME in my ~/.bashrc everything works