Gradle Goodness: Create a Shortcut Key to Refresh Gradle Projects in IntelliJ IDEA

We can open a Gradle project in IntelliJ IDEA and get support for Gradle inside IntelliJ. Sometimes, we need to refresh the project in IntelliJ IDEA, for example when we add a new dependency or plugin in our Gradle build file. We need to refresh the Gradle project so IntelliJ IDEA can work with the changes. The Gradle tool window has an icon to Refresh all Gradle projects. But this means a mouse action and we want to have a shortcut key so we can leave our hands on the keyboard.

The action Refresh all Gradle projects is actually the action Refresh all external projects. We can add keyboard shortcut key via Preferences | Keymap. We use the search box to search for Refresh all external projects.

We can right click on the found action and select Add Keyboard Shortcut to define a new shortcut key:

Now we simply use the shortcut to refresh our Gradle project when we have made a change in the Gradle build file that IntelliJ IDEA should know about.

Besides having the action in the Gradle tool window, we can also add it to the main toolbar. We right click on the main toolbar and select the option Customize Menus and Toolbars.... We can add the action Refresh all external projects here to the toolbar:

Written with Gradle 3.4.1 and IntelliJ IDEA 2016.3.4.