Manage your Android project gradle

Maintain your gradle dependencies in a proper way

While developing android apps, all we think about writing clean code. Have you ever thought how we can manage our android project gradle in clean and smart way?

Recently by contributing in android projects, seen that developers are following different architecture patterns like MVP, MVVM to write clean code. But except some projects they are not give their focus or time to manage project gradle.

Lets see how we can do.

In this post, we’re going to focus on how we can manage our project gradle in clean and smart way.

Lets assume that currently we have one project. And in app level build.gradle we have below dependencies{ … }section with different dependencies:

Lets follow the below steps:

Step 1:
Create ext{..} in your project level build.gradle at bottom as below:

ext{
...
}

Step 2:

Declare all required variables with values in above created ext{ .. } as below:

Here we added variables includes SDK versions, library versions etc from the our gradle dependencies.

Step 3:

Now create one array in ext{..}which contain our dependencies as below:

• Here we have created commonDependency and added our all dependencies with respective version and access variable name.
• Here from the above commonDependency list, consider first kotlin dependency line, where kotlin is consider as access variable.
• Here we have declared other firebaseDependency array where we have added firebase related dependencies to put in single group for firebase. It is good practice to add related dependencies in different group array.

Now our dependencies are ready to use in app level build.gradle. Lets use all declared dependencies in app.

Step 4:

• Now in App level build.gradle we need to access above created ext to use dependencies:

• Create global scope variable above android { ... } section. Here we have created def config = ... which will be use for accessing ext members.

Step 5:

• Now we can access all ext members using created config variable.
  Check below how we are accessing minSdkVersion & targetSdkVersion to set value of sdk versions using config :

Step 6:

• Now set the dependencies using config in dependencies section as below:

• Using config variable we can access commonDependency and firebaseDependency array to use library gradle dependencies.
• Following with the config variable and array name (e.g commonDependency or firebaseDependency ) using Access name you can add required dependency.

Done. Now Sync your project and enjoy new build!

Advantages:

• Manage same version value for group dependencies. Like we have used same version variable ( e.g firebaseVer='16.0.4' for all firebase gradle dependencies.
• Update the ext variable value which will be reflect all over the project.

Demo project:

pranaypatel512/ManageGradleDemo

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