More GitHub Libraries

I’ve come across another potentially useful gradle plugin, and write about one I’ve been using for a while.

buildSrcVersions

buildSrcVersions “is a Gradle plugin that makes it easier to manage your dependencies inside your IDE. It extracts all your dependencies and search for available dependencies updates.”

This plugin will create the buildSrc directory and populate it Gradle Script Kotlin files defining constants for all the libraries in your project. It’s a step in converting your Gradle files to Kotlin, and gaining all the advantages of that (IDE completion, etc).

Unfortunately, at time of writing, there is a bug in Android Studio 3.3’s buildSrc integration that prevents it from working properly. The plugin works fine, and gradle does too, but the IDE features don’t.

gradle-versions-plugin

gradle-versions-plugin “provides a task to determine which dependencies have updates. Additionally, the plugin checks for updates to Gradle itself.”

I’ve been using this plugin for a while now, to provide an easy way to check the versions of all the libraries in a project, and highlight which ones have a newer version available. It doesn’t update the library versions - that’s for me to do after I’ve investigated. Sometimes I want to hold back because of known bugs, or breaking changes.