Managing dependencies in very large monolithic systems

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1

I’m migrating a very large monolithic system with around 1200 gradle projects, each in it’s own git repo.

The dependency map is a big spaghetti ball with circular dependencies which need to be avoided in the CI system so that we don’t trigger endless rebuilding.

In order to avoid that problem I want to keep versioning numbers out of the build.gradle files, so within each project the dependencies are listed something like this:

dependencies {
    compile library(group: 'group_A', name: 'name_A', version: ${key})
    compile library(group: 'group_A', name: 'name_B', version: ${key})
    compile library(group: 'group_B', name: 'name_C', version: ${key})
}

In maven repositories there is a maven-metadata.xml file that contains a set of mappings that almost solves my problem which is essentially to provide some ${key} which resolves to a consistent and tested set of versions from CI. However maven-metadata.xml doesn’t seem to support custom ${key}s which is really my main missing feature because there are lots of developers still used to working in isolated projects who each need to have their own ${key}.

Current we’re building ivy artifacts and storing them in artifactory, but I don’t know if ivy has a similar concept to the maven-metadata.xml (that is supported by gradle). Alternatively I’m looking into using some type of dependency management/resolver that is more gradle-native that might be able to provide equivalent functionality.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction?

2

Have a look at Configuration.resolutionStrategy. You can provide versions programmatically there and your devs can completely omit versions on the declaration side.

3

Thanks for steering us in the right direction @st_oehme

We discovered that Netflix had solved this particular problem to keep version numbers out of the build.gradle files with the dependency-recommender plugin https://github.com/nebula-plugins/nebula-dependency-recommender-plugin

It uses Configuration.resolutionStrategy under the hood and all we need to do is provide it a map with keys and values from somewhere else to resolve the versions.

Works like a charm!

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