Can't read from System.console in cygwin

Old Forum
1

I’m using System.console.readPassword in a gradle to get credentials for the uploadArchives task, which we obviously don’t want to store in a file on disk. This works perfectly in OSX, Windows, and Linux environments, but does not work under Cygwin. I get “Cannot invoke method readLine() on null object”. I think the issue is that System.console returns null under Cygwin. I’m using Gradle version 1.0, and I am not using the daemon.

Thanks,

Steve

2

This is not a Gradle deficiency.

The ‘System.console()’ method is free to return ‘null’ if a console object for the environment can’t be provided, which it can’t be for Cygwin.

If you try to run a plain Java program that uses ‘System.console()’ on Windows it will exhibit the same behaviour.

You can find a rather long discussion about why this doesn’t work here.

3

That’s too bad. I remember hearing at UberConf that Gradle behavior in Cygwin was going to be improved, and I was hoping this would be part of it.

Thank you for looking into it,

Steve

4

We do intend to solve the use case of prompting for credentials, however. We will add an API/DSL to allow you to receive input from the user, plus a bunch of implementations for this. One such implementation will be backed by System.console when available, with a fallback to some native stuff when running under java 5 or cygwin. This will also work when using the daemon/tooling API.