Define non-dependency versions (extension properties) in a central place

Help/Discuss
1

I use a few static code analysis plugins like checkstyle and PMD that can be configured to use a specific version of the underlying tools. I also use convention plugins, i.e. I have a checkstyle specific plugin that I can include from my generic Java convention plugin.

plugins {
    checkstyle
}

checkstyle {
    maxWarnings = 0
    toolVersion = "10.4"
}

I’d like to move the version constraint “10.4” to some central place. For regular dependency versions I use a platform project with dependencies.constraints. With Groovy I was able to create (and include) a simple versions convention plugin that only defines checkstyle { toolVersion = "10.4" }. However, with Kotlin this only works if I also include the “checkstyle” plugin from said version plugin. Furthermore, I don’t think (implictly?) including “checkstyle” from the versions plugin is a good idea, especially if (in the future) I don’t want to have checkstyle at all.

I tried using PluginManager.withPlugin. However, I don’t see how I can check the type of the returned AppliedPlugin instance. Before I start throwing “instanceof” and type casts at the problem, I’d like to know:

What’s a better way of defining versions that are hidden in plugin properties?

2

This seems to do the trick. If the checkstyle plugin isn’t enabled, it fails the build instead of silently enabling it.

import org.gradle.api.plugins.quality.CheckstyleExtension

configure<CheckstyleExtension> {
    toolVersion = "10.4"
}
3

And you could wrap it in a pluginManager.withPlugin("checkstyle") { ... } to not do anything unless the plugin is applied and also work if the plugin is applied after your convention plugin.

Besides that, I usually define all versions, including those, in a version catalog and use it from there.

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