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gradle-autoconfig - Gradle Project AutoConfiguration Framework

It is a result of my years of daily work in my career. Originally are the rules my team followed, some of them are implemented by a gradle plugin, some of them are just a common sense. In this project, I try to turn the common sense part into code too. It provides opinionated way for daily Java/Groovy development in enterprise.

Nebula Plugins is a similar effort, But gradle-autoconfig do it in a cleaner way.

Hopefully it maybe useful for you.

Note

After you cloned this project, please put autoconfig.gradle in your Gradle user home directory's init.d subdirectory, normally in ~/.gradle/init.d/. A symbol link is working correctly.

ln -sv $PWD/gradle/autoconfig/autoconfig.gradle ~/.gradle/init.d/

Design Goals

Low learning curve and Maven compatible

The ultimate goal is automatically configuring everything. The only thing that user need to do is adding dependences to his project's build.gradle. All the building scripts are well organized.

It also provides similar experience for developers originally using Maven by utilizing/customizing several OpenSource Gradle plugins.

Centralizing all build configurations for ease management

In an enterprise, normally there's a CI/CD system. The Ops team need to customize the building environment. Also, specific branching/versioning rules needs to be applied to all projects. gradle-autoconfig is a way to standardize everything.

gradle-autoconfig uses ONE and managed settings.gradle. The root project's only acting like a container that manages the sub-projects, no source code can be put in root project. In this way, it greatly reduces the complexity of management of your Gradle projects.

Step out of your way

You can selectively disable every function gradle-autoconfig provides as you don't like or wish to customize it. It also has a global switch to turn it off completely.

Assumptions

1. Language: Java/Groovy, Only JDK8+ is supported.
2. Repository Manager: SonaType Nexus
3. Source Control Management: Git
4. Gradle 4.2.1 and above

User Guide

Managed Repository Policy

The centralized repository management is really important for an enterprise because of the concerns for Security/API Compatibility/LICENSE ...etc.

However, Gradle allows you to specify separate Repository Manager(SonaType Nexus/Ivy/Artifactory) for Plugin/BuildScript dependencies and Project dependencies.

1. pluginManagement.repositories{} for plugins{} DSL
2. project.buildscript.repositories{} for apply plugin: ${pluginId} DSL
3. project.repositories for your project's dependency
4. buildSrc is a separate project that can be configured independently.

gradle-autoconfig provides a way to set a single repository manager for all.

Managed Project Build Layout

Gradle supports a complex project hierarchy when you are using multiple settings.gradle files. see Build Lifecycle and Multi-project Builds) for details

It's really hard to see the relationships and building logic the first glance. You have to maintain a big settings.gradle file. For example, SpringBoot's settings.gradle or Gradle's settings.gradle.

In gradle-autoconfig, any sub-directory(recursively) in project root contains a file build.gradle will be treated as a valid Gradle project. For example:

 ├── .gradle 
 ├── build 
 ├── gradle
 │   └── wrapper  
+├── sub-project1
+│   └── build.gradle or build.gradle.kts
+│   └── sub-project2
+│       └── build.gradle or build.gradle.kts
 │
 ├── build.gradle or build.gradle.kts 
 ├── gradle.properties 
 ├── gradlew 
 ├── gradlew.bat 
 └── settings.gradle or settings.gradle.kts 

Managed versioning/branching

Managing your artifact's versions is an important and difficult job. Automatically versioning might be a nice thought but really is hard to implement. See this article for more details.Semantic Versioning Sucks! Long Live Semantic Versioning.

There'are a lot of gradle plugins that trying to manage your project's version, such as :

1. Reckon.
2. Neblua Release Plugin
3. Axion Release Plugin
4. ...(Search gradle git version in Google or Gradle Plugin Portal for more results)

They're always enforcing some branching model or version scheme or way too complex. What's I need is a more flexible and intuitive way to manage versions and releases.

SNAPSHOT is strongly not recommended because you might wrongly override other's work or even in other CI/CD pipelines. I think there'is only one scenario that SNAPSHOT version is convenient. You are working on multiple projects that have dependencies with each other. It will save some work by installing your SNAPSHOT artifact to your local maven repository and other projects will get the updates immediately.

In order to keep the maximum compatibility with Maven. Version numbers should stick to Semantic Versioning 1.0.0. See Maven Version Order Specification for more details.

So the version number should be in three forms:

1. RELEASE for officially publications.
2. SNAPSHOT for local development only.
3. PRE-RELEASE for integration purpose.

(To be continued ...)