Getting Lint infrastructure error when lint baseline file is configured in android build

Question

I am getting the following exception when I enable lint with baseline file configuration.

> Lint infrastructure error
  Caused by: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
.........................
.........................
 Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: path must not be null
        at com.android.tools.lint.XmlReporter.writeIssue(XmlReporter.kt:209)
        at com.android.tools.lint.XmlReporter.writeIssues(XmlReporter.kt:113)
        at com.android.tools.lint.XmlReporter.write(XmlReporter.kt:99)
        at com.android.tools.lint.LintCliClient.run(LintCliClient.java:288)

I added following lintOptions in my module build.gradle

After which I ran lintDebug gradle task.

    android{
        lintOptions {
            baseline file("lint-baseline.xml")
            warningsAsErrors true
            abortOnError true
        }
    }

I was expecting my changes to create lint-baseline.xml file in module root directory for the first run and fail the build indicating creation of lint-baseline.xml. For the second run the lint should read lint-baseline.xml and suppress the existing error/warning reporting.

But the first run creates empty lint-baseline.xml and fails with Lint infrastructure error. The subsequent runs did not produce Lint infrastructure error but because the file is empty, the comparison fails resulting in errors/warnings.

My app has both java and kotlin files.

Answer 1

i had this same issue, deleting the 'build' and 'release' folders. Somehow that worked for me. Don't know what actually caused it.

Answer 2

This might not be the best answer, but I tried, adding an old output.json into the APK destination folder and tried to build a signed apk, then the error was known, in which we have to delete the output.json file. This time after building the APK, it worked.

Again on the other day, the above method failed, I tried deleting the release folder and creating the APK again. This time it worked.