Starting from this blog post by Bryan Rosenbaum, here is a gradle task to auto increment versionCode inside your build.gradle file. import java.util.regex.Pattern ... task incrementVersionCode << { println(":incrementVersionCode - Incrementing Version Code...") def buildGradleFile = file("build.gradle") def patternVersionCode = Pattern.compile("versionCode (\\d+)") def buildGradleFileText = buildGradleFile.getText() def matcherVersionCode = patternVersionCode.matcher(buildGradleFileText) matcherVersionCode.find() def mVersionCode = Integer.parseInt(matcherVersionCode.group(1)) def mNextVersionCode = mVersionCode + 1 def manifestContent = matcherVersionCode.replaceAll("versionCode " + mNextVersionCode) println(":incrementVersionCode - current versionCode=" + mVersionCode); println(":incrementVersionCode - next versionCode=" + mNextVersionCode); buildGradleFile.write(manifestContent) } Now run gradle incrementVersionCode and your build.gradle will be automatically updated.