CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gradledependencies
wvxvw
wvxvw

Reputation: 9465

Gradle buildscript dependency not found

Note, that this question may be partially answered by solving the specific problem, but solving the general problem is also appreciated.

Specific problem

I need to pass command-line options to Gradle code. Gradle doesn't have any sensible way to do it, so I need to extract them somehow from System properties and later to parse them. I was trying to employ org.apache.common.cli package for this. But I cannot import it into the build code.

This is roughly what it looks like:

buildscript {
    repositories { ... }
    dependencies {
        classpath group: "commons-cli", name: "commons-cli", version: "1.2"
    }
}
...
org.apache.commons.cli.DefaultParser

And I'm getting this:

* What went wrong:
Could not compile build file 'somewhere/build.gradle'.
> startup failed:
  build file 'somewhere/build.gradle': 35: unable to resolve class org.apache.commons.cli.DefaultParser
   @ line 35, column 1.
     import org.apache.commons.cli.DefaultParser

I have no idea what went wrong or how to debug this. I've also tried Groovy's groovy.util.CliBuilder, but this breaks with even more arcane errors.

So, to solve my immediate problem: I'd be happy to find a simple way to parse command-line arguments passed to Gradle's build.

Generic problem

Is there any way to debug Gradle code? By debugging I don't mean appending --debug argument to it's command line options. It just prints a ton of irrelevant nonsense, but tells you nothing about what it was trying to do and what went wrong. I mean something like an actual debugger.

Is there a way to know what dependencies it was trying to load, and did it succeed at loading them, and if so, where did it load them from?

Is there any way to translate the "Gradle language" into something that can be analyzed by a linter / editor s.t. one would know what parts of it do / if it makes sense to add other parts of certain kind (what I mean is some sort of intellisense to make understanding problems like unmet dependencies easier)?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2088

Answers (1)

Michael Easter
Michael Easter

Reputation: 24468

This post is asking several questions and is highly subjective (re: "doesn't have any sensible way"). I'll do what I can.

First, as a sanity check for buildscript, let's try Apache Commons Lang3:

import org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath group: 'org.apache.commons', name: 'commons-lang3', version: '3.4'
    }
}

println "TRACER : " + StringUtils.class.simpleName

The above script works, but with Gradle 2.14.1, I can confirm that DefaultParser from Apache Commons CLI 1.3.1 (as an aside, it's not in v 1.2) does not work. I suspect this is related to this bug. The link mentions dom4j but it may be that cli is in the same category.

Regarding command-line arguments, the Gradle documentation contains examples of using -P, -D, gradle.properties, and so on. If you have a specific parsing issue, please create a new question with specifics.

Regarding dependencies, the following commands may be of use:

gradle dependencies
gradle buildEnvironment

see this post for the latter.

Upvotes: 1

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