How do you migrate a Gradle 7 build to Gradle 8?

Migrating across a major Gradle version is mostly about working through removed/deprecated APIs and adjusting to stricter defaults, and Gradle's own tooling covers most of the mechanical work.

1. Run the built-in deprecation checks first, on Gradle 7 — ./gradlew help --warning-mode all surfaces every deprecation warning that would become a hard error on 8, so they can be fixed one version at a time rather than all at once.
2. Update the wrapper to a Gradle 8.x version via ./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 8.14.4, so the whole team and CI move together.
3. Update plugin versions — older plugin versions built against Gradle 7's APIs are the most common source of migration failures; check each plugin's compatibility notes.
4. Review Gradle's official upgrade guide for the specific 7-to-8 breaking changes (removed APIs, changed default behaviors around task validation and dependency resolution).
5. Re-run the full build and test suite, paying particular attention to custom tasks that may have relied on now-removed internal APIs.
6. Opt into the configuration cache separately, afterward, once the plain 8.x migration is stable — treating it as a second, independent step avoids conflating two different classes of potential breakage.

Doing the deprecation-warning cleanup before bumping the wrapper version, rather than after, turns most of what would otherwise be a wall of build failures into warnings that can be addressed incrementally while the build still works.