How to run your Kotlin gradle built app from the command line

So you build your Kotlin app, you went through the trouble of creating a build.gradle script that you build with

gradle assemble

this outputs a a “build/libs/kotlin.jar” .jar file, but you have no clue how to run your Kotlin code from the command line.

Doing it by hand with “java -cp ” is too much work, and there is a way to do

gradle run

or even

gradle -b /home/myuser/mykotlinapp/build.gradle run

in case you need to run your Kotlin script from a cronjob.

Make sure you have the following inside your build.gradle script in order to make the “run” task available


apply plugin: 'application'

// optional: add one string per argument you want as the default JVM args
applicationDefaultJvmArgs = ["-Xms512m", "-Xmx1g"]


What if I don’t want to use gradle, and just java

ok… ok…
java -cp $KOTLIN_LIB/kotlin-runtime.jar:build/libs/kotlin.jar: com.myapp.MyKotlinAppKt