In Gradle, how do I declare common dependencies in a single place?

Question

In Maven there is a very useful feature where you can define a dependency in the <dependencyManagement> section of the parent POM, and reference that dependency from child modules without specifying the version or scope or whatever.

What are the alternatives in Gradle?

Answer 1

You can declare common dependencies in a parent script:

ext.libraries = [ // Groovy map literal
    spring_core: "org.springframework:spring-core:3.1",
    junit: "junit:junit:4.10"
]

From a child script, you can then use the dependency declarations like so:

dependencies {
    compile libraries.spring_core
    testCompile libraries.junit
}

To share dependency declarations with advanced configuration options, you can use DependencyHandler.create:

libraries = [
    spring_core: dependencies.create("org.springframework:spring-core:3.1") {
        exclude module: "commons-logging"
        force = true
    }
]

Multiple dependencies can be shared under the same name:

libraries = [
    spring: [ // Groovy list literal
        "org.springframework:spring-core:3.1", 
        "org.springframework:spring-jdbc:3.1"
    ]
]

dependencies { compile libraries.spring } will then add both dependencies at once.

The one piece of information that you cannot share in this fashion is what configuration (scope in Maven terms) a dependency should be assigned to. However, from my experience it is better to be explicit about this anyway.

Answer 2

As of Gradle 4.6, dependency constraints are suggested in the documentation as the way to achieve this. From https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/declaring_dependencies.html#declaring_a_dependency_without_version:

A recommended practice for larger projects is to declare dependencies without versions and use dependency constraints for version declaration. The advantage is that dependency constraints allow you to manage versions of all dependencies, including transitive ones, in one place.

In your parent build.gradle file:

allprojects {
  plugins.withType(JavaPlugin).whenPluginAdded {
    dependencies {
      constraints {
        implementation("com.google.guava:guava:27.0.1-jre")
      }
    }
  }
}

Wrapping the dependencies block with a check for the Java plugin (... whenPluginAdded {) isn't strictly necessary, but it will then handle adding a non-Java project to the same build.

Then in a child gradle project you can simply omit the verison:

apply plugin: "java"

dependencies {
  implementation("com.google.guava:guava")
}

Child builds can still choose to specify a higher version. If a lower version is specified it is automatically upgraded to the version in the constraint.