Shared settings between independent repositories

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1

I am a little bit stumped at the moment. When I set out to reduce repetition in a few Gradle projects I figured what I want is simple, but it seems that I was wrong. I have 3 projects that live in separate git repositories and are built separately. These projects do however share a few common settings. These include:

  • repository definitions for plugins (“pluginManagement”)
  • repository definitions for dependencies (“dependencyResolutionManagement”)
  • version catalog

All in all, their settings.gradle files are all identical apart from the rootProject.name. This includes stuff like corporate repositories, the version of the version catalog artifact and more.

I find myself copying the settings.gradle file between all the projects whenever a change is made. I figured there must be a mechanism to load the same settings for all of them through a plugin or similar, but there does not seem to be a way. My question is therefore: How can independent projects that are not built together share a common settings.gradle or ideally inherit from a common settings.gradle?

In an ideal world i would store the settings file in some remote repository and be able to simply reference the URL in another settings file. Alternatively a plug-in seems reasonable, though it seems a plug-in can’t really be applied to the settings file. It would also require a repository definition for the plug-in, which would be repeated.

Are there any best practice approaches for this issue?

1 Like
2

You can have a settings plugin, but it will be an instance of Plugin<Settings> instead of Plugin<Project>. There’s a little bit of a chicken-or-egg problem there since:

  1. You’re trying to share/centralise repository settings
  2. Plugins need a repository

Perhaps you’d prefer the following in settings.gradle

apply from: 'http://path/to/1.3.3/shared-settings.gradle'

Remember to include the version in the URL so it’s versioned/repeatable

3

Hi, thanks for the response. I see, yeah I figured the repository problem was gonna be a thing, though it would be reduced to a single one. I had tried a Plugin<Settings>, but I couldn’t figure out how to apply it correctly in settings (it wasn’t working).

Does the apply from thing work in settings too? I thought I had tried it to no avail. Maybe I specified the URL wrong in Kotlin. Anyway, my repositories were not going to the build file causing errors.

4

Does the apply from thing work in settings too?

Yes, Settings implements PluginAware