We have specified own nexus for plugins and dependencies in setting.gradle. However, I see gradle still tries to download groovy from the gradle.org. Why would it?

Did you try to configure "fail on project repos"? Maybe you have applied some bad plugin that defines some repo. That would win over the settings defined repos with default settings.

We have kotlin dsl code in project - for plugins and some code in the buildSrc

But you said it is downloading groovy, not Gradle sources. I might remember wrongly and it is also due to that issue. But I thought it should only be relevant for the Gradle sources download.

Added

RepositoriesMode.FAIL_ON_PROJECT_REPOS

But I found that I can only add it for the module dependencies and can not find something similar for plugin

Because projects / project plugins cannot add plugin repos

Ah, you mean

pluginManagement {
    repositories {
        maven {
         url ....
        }
    }
}

Is only for plugin dependencies

Hm, that's not from the linked bug. That linked bug would result in

<http://services.gradle.org|services.gradle.org>

URLs.

Let me try!

That you probably need to complain to Gradle about 🙂

Haha, i will!