What is the colon operator in Gradle?

Question

You always see code like

project(':bluewhale').hello 

This doesn't seem to be Groovy syntax, what is it?

Allusive

Answer 1

The colon is not an operator (you can see it's being used inside a string). It's the separator that Gradle uses to describe paths to subprojects. For example,

evaluationDependsOn(':api:producer')

would look for the subproject producer of the subproject api.

Allusive

For those like me who were looking for the meaning of the colon when executing a task, this is explained in this answer: https://mcmap.net/q/536875/-why-is-there-a-difference-between-gradlew-clean-build-and-gradlew-clean-build – Cattish