Is there a way to have gradle ignore dependency checking, basically assume everything is up-to-date, and simply execute the desired java test? We have an old process that uses gradlew to build the product on a "bigger" AWS instance, then zip it up and send it to a "smaller" AWS instance. It then starts the gradlew based java test. For years, no one noticed that gradle is rebuilding the entire product (and downloading the 3rd party dependencies) on this two core machine. Hoping for a simple command line solution.

What exactly do you zip, the build folders?

entire source & build tree, but not ~/.gradle

Just use

-x

to exclude the tasks you do not want to run because you know better than Gradle?

thank you.

long-term if you want to run the tests on a different machine than you're building them, I think it would make more sense to package and distribute like a regular Java application rather than re-running Gradle on a copy of the worktree which might fail for other reasons (it'll need artifacts and transforms in the Gradle user home directory too)

I agree, but do not want to tackle the project. I am the C++ coder stuck in a Java world.

That's not so much a Gradle question. That is a message from the javacc plugin: https://github.com/javacc/javaccPlugin