How to use property for version when using a plugin via id?

Help/Discuss
1

In my gradle.properties I have

kotlinVersion=1.1.1

And in my build.gradle I have

plugins {
    id 'org.jetbrains.kotlin.jvm' version "${project.properties.kotlinVersion}"
 }

 println "${project.properties.kotlinVersion}"

But this yields

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* Where:
Build file 'build.gradle' line: 2

* What went wrong:
Could not compile build file 'build.gradle'.
> startup failed:
  build file 'build.gradle': 2: argument list must be exactly 1 literal non empty string

  See https://docs.gradle.org/3.4.1/userguide/plugins.html#sec:plugins_block for information on the plugins {} block

   @ line 2, column 9.
             id 'org.jetbrains.kotlin.jvm' version "${project.properties.kotlinVersion}"
             ^

  1 error

Is there a particular reason why I cannot use properties to refer to the plugin version here?

2

This is a functional gap that the Gradle team has acknowledged and planning to address.

@st_oehme is there any update on the timeline, or any kind of roadmap document?

3

Thanks Dimitar. If the Gradle team has already acknowledged this limitation, I assume there’s a tracking issue on GitHub you could provide a link for? So far I wasn’t able to find one.

4

There is not, but please feel free to open one. Our plan is to fix this and many other shortcomings of the plugins DSL by the middle of this year.

5

Done: https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/1697.