Gradle does not update snapshot dependencies

Question

I have a gradle project that has a dependency on another gradle project. The dependency is being published to our in-house nexus server and can be resolved just fine.

Once the dependency has been cached locally I cannot get it to be refreshed unless I pass in --refresh-dependencies to the gradle command (or delete it manually from the cache).

Having searched the internet I found a lot of people with the same problem and the suggestion was to mark the dependency as changing (although this is not strictly necessary as it is implicit from the name -SNAPSHOT) and to add this:

configurations.all {
    resolutionStrategy.cacheChangingModulesFor 0, 'seconds'
}

however this does not work for me, it will always used the cached version until the gradle default 24 hours is up and then it will re-download it.

Does anyone have any idea what else I may be missing, or how I can diagnose what gradle is doing and why it is not going to nexus to download new versions?

Answer 1

After some trial and error I found that the reason the feature wasn't working as expected was because we were using the spring-boot plugin. The spring-boot plugin uses its own dependency management plugin which has its own configuration for the changing modules:

dependencyManagement {
    resolutionStrategy {
        cacheChangingModulesFor 0, 'seconds'
    }
}

Adding this snippet to the gradle file forces changing modules to always be downloaded.