How to do it...

After installing the Gradle STS extension, perform the following steps to install the Spring Gradle project:

1. After installing, you are ready to create a Gradle project for Spring development. Go to the New project wizard (Ctrl-N) of STS Eclipse and create a Gradle project.
   
2. On the Gradle Project wizard, assign a name for your project and choose Java Quickstart for the Sample project option. Click Finish and it will take a while to create, build, clean, and install your Gradle STS project.
3. Delete unnecessary project files. Right-click on the project and click on Gradle (STS) | Refresh all.

1. Open the build.gradle and overwrite the existing configuration with this:

apply plugin: 'eclipse'
apply plugin: "war"

sourceCompatibility = 1.8 
version = '1.0' 

war { 
    baseName = 'ch02-gradle' 
    version = '1.0' 
} 

sourceCompatibility = 1.8 

repositories { 
    mavenCentral() 
    jcenter() 
}

1. Right-click on the project and click Gradle (STS) | Tasks Quick Launcher to run the Gradle Task Launcher. Using the launcher, clean and build the project for the first time:

1. Finally, at this point, you have created your Spring Gradle project which will look like this: