Gradle Libraries Plugin

This plugin allows to specify versions of external libraries in a centralized place and use them across the project. It's specifically useful for Gradle multi-projects.

This plugin also uses com.github.ben-manes.versions plugin to automatically update libraries once new releases are available.

Usage

After applying the plugin:

plugins {
  id("com.github.fkorotkov.libraries") version "1.1"
}

Run ./gradlew syncLibraries to create $rootDir/dependencies.json file with all currently known dependencies.

dependencies.json file format is pretty straightforward. It contains an alphabetically sorted list of dependencies in the following format:

{
  "libraries": [
    {
      "group": "com.google.guava",
      "name": "guava",
      "version": "22.0"
    }
  ]
}  

Once dependencies.json file is in place by generating via syncLibraries task or just by manually creating it, all declared in dependencies.json libraries can be used in project files as showed below:

dependencies {
  compile libraries['com.google.guava:guava']
}

Using aliases

There is also an option to specify an alias for a library to override the default <group>:<name> key. Simply add alias property in depepndencies.json:

{
  "libraries": [
    {
      "group": "com.google.guava",
      "name": "guava",
      "version": "22.0",
      "alias": "google-guava"
    }
  ]
}  

And now it can be used like this:

dependencies {
  compile libraries['google-guava']
}

Updating Libraries Automatically

It's not a secret that it's really hard keep libraries up to date especially when there are dozens and sometimes hundreds of them. For that purpose this plugin has updateLibraries task that will automatically check for available new versions of libraries. This functionality is based on an awesome com.github.ben-manes.versions plugin(this plugin brings com.github.ben-manes.versions plugin on the classpath). See com.github.ben-manes.versions plugin docs for more details on how to customize resolutionStrategy to alert you only on updates you are interested.

Here is an example of a resolutionStrategy that rejects versions that contain dev or eap.

updateLibraries {
  resolutionStrategy {
    componentSelection { rules ->
      rules.all { ComponentSelection selection ->
        boolean rejected = ['dev', 'eap'].any { qualifier ->
          selection.candidate.version ==~ /(?i).*[.-]${qualifier}[.\d-]*/
        }
        if (rejected) {
          selection.reject('dev version')
        }
      }
    }
  }
}