Hi. I am looking to use gradle for dependency change polling, in our CI server.
Since polling runs frequently, I would like to ask gradle to evaluate its dependencies block (or even just a single dependency line) to find the latest artifact GAV, without actually downloading the artifacts.
For example, say I have a dependency foo.bar:bas:1.0.+ – is there a way to ask gradle to evaluate the latest artifact GAV matching that criteria, without actually downloading it?
This would then allow us to compare it to a previous GAV and see if we need to trigger a new build.
I would recommend the gradle-dependency-locking-plugin. That will let you have a source control version of which dependencies you want, while also declaring your ideal dependencies, e.g. 1.0.+. We run with the generateLock task every morning, and if the test pass, we check into the lock file. If the tests fail, we get an email from Jenkins and the old lock file stays in place.