How to build a self-executable JAR with Gradle and Kotlin

Kotlin is great for creating small command-line utilities, which can be packaged and distributed as normal JAR files. In this recipe, we will see how to do it using Gradle build system. Gradle build system is one of the most sophisticated build systems out there. It is the default build tool for Android and is designed to ease scripting of complex, multilanguage builds with a lot of dependencies (typical of big projects). It achieves the goal of automating your project without compromising on maintainability, usability, flexibility, extensibility, or performance. We will be using Gradle build system to create a self-extracting JAR file. This JAR file can be distributed to and run on any platform supporting Java.