Manage Android dependencies versions using gradle extra properties.

This is yet another tip you can use in improving your Android development experience and speed.

We all love dependencies right? Yes we do!

A typical Android studio project (you can stop reading now if you still use Eclipse 😑 seriously) has a project level build.gradle file and as many module-level build.gradle as there are modules.

Dependencies are usually managed at the app-module level, and your app-module build.gradle file can quickly get messy from dependencies. It gets even worse, when you have other modules you reference in your app-module, each with its own dependencies.

In this post, I’ll show a quick way of making things look neat, and easy to maintain.

Externalize hardcoded values.

Let’s say our project’s app-module build.gradle looks like this:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'
android {
    ...
}
...
dependencies {
    // support libraries
    compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:23.4.0'
    compile 'com.android.support:design:23.4.0'
    compile 'com.android.support:percent:23.4.0'
    compile 'com.android.support:cardview-v7:23.4.0'
    compile 'com.android.support:gridlayout-v7:23.4.0'

    //play services
    compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:9.2.1'
    compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:9.2.1'

    // other dependencies
    ...
}

You can see that we’ve repeated quite a number of versions, including the android support libraries.

What we want to do is to externalize hardcoded values in our build.gradle file by leveraging gradle’s extra properties.

We can extract these hardcoded into an ext block. Our build.gradle file will now look like this:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'
android {
    ...
}
...

ext {
    supportLibraryVersion = '23.4.0'
    playServicesVersion = '9.2.1'
}

dependencies {
    // support libraries
    compile "com.android.support:appcompat-v7:$supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:design:$supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:percent:$supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:cardview-v7:$supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:gridlayout-v7:$supportLibraryVersion"

    //play services
    compile "com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:$playServicesVersion"
    compile "com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:$playServicesVersion"

    // other dependencies
    ...
}

Wait…what changed!?

If you look closely, you’ll notice that

compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:23.4.0' changed to:

compile "com.android.support:appcompat-v7:$supportLibraryVersion"

Notice the change from single quotes to double quotes. Also note that the use of $ here is simply use of String interpolation in Groovy

Easy peasy!

What to do for multiple modules?

So, besides you app-module, let’s say you also have another awesome-library module you have written and is used in this project. This awesome-library, uses some dependencies also declared in your app-module.

How do we fix this? You might be tempted to have an ext block in both modules. That will work, but if you need to upgrade the support library version, you will need to modify the version, in both modules.

The fix is simple, we move the ext tag to our root project build.gradle file.

Our root build.gradle file then looks like this:

buildscript {
    ...
}

allprojects {
    ...
}
...

ext {
    // sdk and tools
    minSdkVersion = 14
    targetSdkVersion = 23
    compileSdkVersion = 23
    buildToolsVersion = '23.0.2'

    // dependencies versions
    supportLibraryVersion = '23.4.0'
    playServicesVersion = '9.2.1'
}

My module-level build.gradle files then look like this:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'
android {
    ...
}
...

dependencies {
    // support libraries
    compile "com.android.support:appcompat-v7:$rootProject.supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:design:$rootProject.supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:percent:$rootProject.supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:cardview-v7:$rootProject.supportLibraryVersion"
    compile "com.android.support:gridlayout-v7:$rootProject.supportLibraryVersion"

    //play services
    compile "com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:$rootProject.playServicesVersion"
    compile "com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:$rootProject.playServicesVersion"

    // other dependencies
    ...
}

Extra?

I also use this technique to manage minSdkVersion, targetSdkVersion, compileSdkVersion and buildToolsVersion in my projects.

Check out this gist for a fuller example of how I do this.

If you have any comments/suggestions or corrections, I’d love to hear them. Please do not hesitate to drop a comment below or tweet at me.

Please share if you found this tip useful 🙈😁

Cheers :)