What's the difference between buildscript and allprojects in build.gradle?

Question

On a multi-project gradle build, can someone tell me what exactly is the difference between the \"allprojects\" section and the \"buildscript\" one? Both have a repos

Answer 1

TL;DR: buildscript helps find plugins, allprojects applies to all projects

---

https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/userguide_single.html#applyPluginBuildscript says

Binary plugins that have been published as external jar files can be added to a project by adding the plugin to the build script classpath and then applying the plugin.

So you need buildscript for gradle to find the plugins, as

Gradle at its core intentionally provides very little for real world automation. All of the useful features, like the ability to compile Java code, are added by plugins. Plugins add new tasks (e.g. JavaCompile), domain objects (e.g. SourceSet), conventions (e.g. Java source is located at src/main/java) as well as extending core objects and objects from other plugins.

Concerning allprojects:

The Project API provides a property allprojects which returns a list with the current project and all its subprojects underneath it. If you call allprojects with a closure, the statements of the closure are delegated to the projects associated with allprojects.