GradleUp/shadow

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4225 stars · 425 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Shadow is a Gradle plugin for creating fat/uber JARs that combine a project's classes and all its dependencies into a single executable JAR. It also supports file transformation, package relocation to avoid classpath conflicts, and application optimization via R8/ProGuard.

Use cases

• build a single executable fat jar with gradle
• bundle dependencies into one jar for a java application
• relocate packages in a jar to avoid dependency conflicts
• create an uber jar for a kotlin library
• run my app with java -jar including all dependencies
• shade dependencies in a gradle build like maven shade plugin
• minimize and optimize a jar with R8 or ProGuard

When to choose

• you use Gradle and need a self-contained executable JAR distribution
• you publish a library and want to bundle/relocate dependencies to prevent classpath conflicts
• you are migrating from the Maven Shade Plugin to a Gradle build
• you want jar transformation and shrinking with R8/ProGuard integrated into your build

When to avoid

• your project builds with Maven rather than Gradle
• you need a distributable archive (tar/zip) rather than a single jar
• your dependencies use complex service loading or signed jars that don't shade cleanly

Facets

plugin · maturity active

build-tool package-manager compression developer-tools jvm gradle-plugin fat-jar uber-jar shading package-relocation proguard r8 jar-bundling jvm build-automation gradle

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="GradleUp/shadow")