Is it possible to add an AndroidManifest to a specific buildType with Gradle (not product flavor)?

Question

We're working on setting up some Activity instrumentation tests to run on a build server. Since this requires the device to be awake, the options that I've found seem to be:

1. Set the devices to "Stay Awake" and disable the screen lock

2. Disable the Keyguard programmatically in the test case (as described here)

Option 1 doesn't seem great as it wastes the battery and will eventually cause burn-in on the device displays. Option 2 seems preferable, but I'd rather keep the DISABLE_KEYGUARD permission strictly to debug builds (not release) so that all product flavors are testable, but the permission is never requested for a release build.

I know we can add manifests to merge using sourceSets:

android.sourceSets.development {
    manifest.srcFile 'development/AndroidManifest.xml'
}

But I've not yet found an equivalent way to do so only for specific build types -- something like this (which isn't valid):

buildTypes {
    debug {
         manifest.srcFile 'debug/AndroidManifest.xml'
    }
}

Is there an official way to do this? Any other recommendations? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can have sourceSets for build types the same way as for flavors. This should work:

android.sourceSets.debug {
    manifest.srcFile 'debug/AndroidManifest.xml'
}

Having said that, the directory structure means that you shouldn't need to manually configure sourceSets unless you're using a non-default layout. In the standard structure you can do this and not configure sourceSets in your build file at all:

module_directory
+--src
   +--main
      +--AndroidManifest.xml
      +--java
      +--res
   +--flavor1
      +--AndroidManifest.xml
      +--java
      +--res
   +--debug
      +--AndroidManifest.xml
      +--java
      +--res
   +--release          
      +--AndroidManifest.xml
      +--java
      +--res

etc.