Managing dependencies is a boring, painful part of a programmer's life.

To qualify as truly painless, my ideal dependency management system would have to

• ✅ not make me work with magic strings
• ✅ allow me to reuse the dependencies information across modules
• ✅ have good IDE support (auto-completion, jumping to the definition, quick documentation, ...)
• ✅ provide a helpful link to the website so that I can quickly look-up what this thing does, where the documentation is, what the CHANGELOG says, ...
• ✅ inform me what newer versions of that dependency are available
• ✅ do all of the above automatically
• ✅ allow me to easily update the dependency version manually
• ✅ never do that automatically

We all have tried different iterations to make working with dependencies better.

gradle-kotlin-dsl-libs is my attempt at checking all those checkboxes.

gradle-kotlin-dsl-libs is a Gradle plugin that you add to your builds.

It extends the gradle-versions-plugin that produce a report.json file with information about all your dependencies

It then automatically generates two Kotlin files that you can use in your build:

• buildSrc/src/main/kotlin/Libs.kt
• buildSrc/src/main/kotlin/Versions.kt

The IDE integration comes by the virtue of the Kotlin support in Gradle and Android Studio & IntelliJ.

Screencast: https://www.useloom.com/share/7edceb83fd594f319356240fcce304d5

Blog article: How Kotlin makes editing your Gradle build less frustrating

Note that you do NOT need to rewrite your build benefit from this plugin.

It's a Gradle best practice to move the build logic to that special buildSrc module. Any kotlin code present there can be used in your existing build.gradle (Groovy) files and the IDE integration (auto-completion, ...) works there as well.

Use either your own project or this sample repository

$ git clone https://github.com/jmfayard/sample-synclibs

Edit your root build.gradle(.kts) file

// ./build.gradle
// don't put anything before the buildscript and plugins blocks!
buildscript { 
   //...
}
plugins {
  // Find latest version at https://plugins.gradle.org/plugin/jmfayard.github.io.gradle-kotlin-dsl-libs
  id("jmfayard.github.io.gradle-kotlin-dsl-libs") version "0.2.6" // $ ./gradlew syncLibs
}

$ ./gradlew syncLibs
# give him time to find all the newer versions

$ find buildSrc -name "*.kt*"
buildSrc/build.gradle.kts
buildSrc/settings.gradle.kts
buildSrc/src/main/kotlin/Libs.kt
buildSrc/src/main/kotlin/Versions.kt

Repeat this step whenever you want to check if newer versions are available.

Replace your dependency strings with Libs.xxx

dependencies {
  implementation(Libs.okio)
  implementation(Libs.okhttp_apache)
  implementation(Libs.rxjava)
}

Enjoy the deep integration of gradle kotlin dsl with your IDE

You can run again anytime the $ ./gradlew syncLibs task

Edit then the file: buildSrc/src/main/kotlin/Versions.kt