How to Keep Gradle Running All Tasks Even When Some Fail

Gradle stops the entire build as soon as any task fails, providing fast feedback. If you want the build to continue executing all tasks regardless of individual failures, you can use the command‑line option --continue. With this flag, Gradle runs every task whose dependencies have not failed, which is especially useful in multi‑module projects where you may still want to see test results from all modules.

Sample build script

task failTask << {
    println "Running ${task.name}"
    throw new TaskExecutionException(
            task,
            new Exception('Fail task on purpose'))
}

task successTask << {
    println "Running ${it.name}"
}

The script defines two tasks: failTask, which intentionally throws a TaskExecutionException, and successTask, which simply prints a message and never fails.

Running without --continue

$ gradle failTask successTask
:failTask
Running failTask
:failTask FAILED

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* Where:
Build file '/Users/mrhaki/samples/gradle/continue/build.gradle' line: 4
* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':failTask'.
> Fail task on purpose
* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
BUILD FAILED
Total time: 4.148 secs

Only failTask runs; the build stops immediately after its failure, and successTask is never executed.

Running with --continue

$ gradle --continue failTask successTask
:failTask
Running failTask
:failTask FAILED
:successTask
Running successTask

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* Where:
Build file '/Users/mrhaki/samples/gradle/continue/build.gradle' line: 4
* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':failTask'.
> Fail task on purpose
* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
BUILD FAILED
Total time: 6.918 secs

With --continue, Gradle still reports the failure of failTask but proceeds to execute successTask. After the build finishes, Gradle provides a summary of all failed tasks, allowing you to see the full picture of which modules succeeded and which did not.

This behavior is valuable for comprehensive testing across large projects, where you may want to collect all test results even if some tests fail.