Android Studio is an IDE. It uses Gradle as a build engine. Gradle is not an IDE. It is a command-line tool with a tooling API that IDEs like Android Studio use.
The error messages emitted by Gradle will be focused on the command-line interface (CLI). After all, that is the only human-accessible means of interacting with Gradle that is native to Gradle itself. Like most modules with an API, Gradle does not have detailed knowledge of the apps that use the API, and therefore Gradle cannot provide Android Studio-specific error information.
In Android Studio, you most likely received your error message in the Gradle Console or the "Messages Gradle Sync" windows. Both pertain to the Gradle build process, and the messages that you see in those windows come from Gradle, even though they are displayed by Android Studio.
With that in mind, let's look at the second bullet:
Try: Run gradle tasks to get a list of available tasks. Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
Here, "gradle tasks" refers to gradle tasks
, where gradle
is the Gradle CLI and tasks
is a command telling the CLI to list the available tasks. --info
and --debug
are command-line switches for the CLI, providing additional configuration for the command being run.
You can learn more about Gradle and its CLI at the Gradle site.
A normal newly-created Android Studio project has a compileDebugSources
task, and so something is a bit broken with your project, perhaps tied to its Gradle build files. You are welcome to follow the error message's suggestion and use --info
or --debug
with the gradle tasks
command. I just ran those on a working project, and you may find their output to be difficult to decipher.