How do I upgrade Gradle?

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 "https://get.sdkman.io" | 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.