Dependency management comes with a wealth of terminology. Here you can find the most commonly-used terms including references to the user guide to learn about their practical appliation.
Artifact
A file or directory produced by a build, such as a JAR, a ZIP distribution, or a native executable.
Artifacts are typically designed to be used or consumed by users or other projects, or deployed to hosting systems. In such cases, the artifact is a single file. Directories are common in the case of inter-project dependencies to avoid the cost of producing the publishable artifact(?).
Component
Any single version of module.
For external libraries, the term component refers to one published version of the library.
In a build, components are defined by plugins (e.g. the Java Library plugin) and provide a simple way to define a publication for publishing. They comprise artifacts as well as the appropriate metadata that describes a component's variants in detail.
Module
A piece of software that evolves over time e.g. Google Guava. Every module has a name. Each release of a module is optimally represented by a module version. For convenient consumption, modules can be hosted in a repository.
Repository
A repository hosts a set of modules, each of which may provide one or many releases (components) indicated by a module version. The repository can be based on a binary repository product (e.g. Artifactory or Nexus) or a directory structure in the filesystem. For more information, see Declaring Repositories.
Variant (of a component)
Each component consists of one or more variants. A variant consists of a set of artifacts and defines a set of dependencies. It is identified by a set of attributes and capabilites.
Gradle's dependency resolution is variant-aware and selects one or more variants of each component after a component (i.e. one version of a module) has been selected. It may also if the variant selection result is ambiguous, meaning that Gradle does not have enough information to select one of multiple mutual exclusive variants. In that case, more information can be provided through variant attributes. Examples of variants each Java components typically offers are api and runtime variants. Others examples are JDK8 and JDK11 variants. For more information, see the section on variant selection.
