How to find which checkstyle version gradle is using?

Question

In my gradle file I have:

apply plugin: 'checkstyle'

I'm trying to create my own checkstyle rules. For this reason I have added a dependency to my gradle file.

dependencies {
     checkstyle 'com.puppycrawl.tools:checkstyle:8.2'
}

I am trying to extend "Check" class of checkstyle. But there are a lot of version of checkstyle and I dont know which one is used by gradle.

How can I find the exact version number of checkstyle which gradle is using?

Answer 1

There are three ways I can think of right now, least attractive first:

• You can look into the Gradle source code.
• You can check the Checkstyle Compatibility Matrix (column L, yellow cells).
  Both say that from Gradle 3.3 onwards, the default Checkstyle version is 6.19; before, it was 5.9. Only Gradle versions prior to 2.4 used even older versions of Checkstyle.

• But the recommended way is to choose the Checkstyle version explicitly, by specifying it in your build.gradle file:

  checkstyle {
      configFile file('your/checkstyle.xml');
      toolVersion '8.2';    // your choice here
  }
  

  This is better than relying on the default version, because you can use much newer versions of Checkstyle, and your Checkstyle setup won't break when you update Gradle.

Answer 2

You can check the current value of checkstyle.toolVersion by writing this in your build.gradle file and reloading your gradle project

plugins {
    id 'java'
    id 'checkstyle'
}

println checkstyle.toolVersion