Gradle Version Catalog: Basic Understanding— Part 1

A beginner’s guide for Gradle Version Catalog : A powerful tool for dependency management.

What is Gradle Version Catalog?

A Gradle version catalog is a file that contains a list of dependencies and their versions. You can use a version catalog to declare dependencies in your Gradle build scripts. When you declare a dependency using a version catalog, Gradle will automatically resolve the correct version of the dependency for your project.

What’s the problem with current Gradle system?

The current Gradle system has these two main problems and Gradle version catalog solve it very efficiently.

It does not allow you to centralize the management of your dependencies. This means that you have to declare all of your dependencies in each project, which can lead to errors and inconsistencies.

Let’s understand these problems using this example :

// build.gradle file
dependencies {
    implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:1.6.0"
}

In this example, we have declared a dependency of Kotlin, which is version 1.6.0. But have you ever thought about what happens if we need to upgrade this version? for example, 1.7.0 Obviously, we will update the build.gradle file. This is fine if we are only ones working on this project.

However, what happens if we are working in a team and other developers are also using the old build.gradle file, and this is a very big project? Now, they willl be using the older version of Kotlin and I will be using new version of Kotlin, which could lead to compatibility issues.

The Gradle Version Catalog solve this issue by allowing you to centralize dependency management, which means that you can declare all of your dependencies in one place, and then use those dependencies in all of your projects. This can help to avoid errors caused by using different versions of the same dependency in different projects.

Current Gradle system does not allow you to cache the results of dependency resolution. This can lead to slow build times, especially if your project has a lot of dependencies.

Suppose, we have declared the Kotlin dependency as we have seen in the example. Now, when Gradle builds your project, it will first resolve the dependencies that you have declared in the build.gradle file. This simply means that if the JAR files are not already in the local cache, it will download the JAR files for the dependencies from its repository.

Now you may need to rebuild your project during development. now Gradle will again resolve the dependencies. This means that it will again download the JAR files for the dependencies from its repository, even if they are already in the local cache. This can lead to slow build times, especially if your project has a lot of dependencies.

The Gradle Version Catalog solve this issue by allowing you to cache the results of dependency resolution which means that Gradle will only download the JAR files for the dependencies once. If you re-build your project, Gradle will use the JAR files that are already in the local cache. This can significantly improve build performance.

Benefits of using Gradle Version Catalogs

• Centralization: With a single source of truth for dependency versions, it becomes easier to ensure consistency across projects.
• Simplified Updates: When a new version of a library is released, you can update it in the catalog, and all projects referencing that catalog will receive the update.
• Version Conflict Resolution: The catalog helps to avoid version conflicts by enforcing the specified versions throughout your projects.
• Ease of Collaboration: By sharing the catalog across teams, you foster collaboration and maintain a unified standard across your organization.

Android Studio Hedgehog now uses Gradle Version Catalogs by default for new projects. How cool is that? 😎

If you are not using Gradle version catalogs, I encourage you to give them a try. They can be a powerful tool for improving the dependency management in your projects.

Now that we have explored the basics of Gradle Version Catalog, in the next part of this series, we will understand the steps to create Gradle Version Catalog. You can read it here.

Stay tuned! Happy reading 📚 Happy coding 💻

If you have any query related to Android, I’m always happy to help you. You can reach me on Twitter and LinkedIn.