What is the transforms-1 folder inside of the .gradle caches folder

Question

Would anyone happen to know or have documentation to what the transforms-1 folder is for gradle's caches? For instance on Mac the folders path is ~/.gradle/caches/transforms-1. It seems Android studio uses it but I was wondering what else it is used for?

Answer 1

This appears to be where gradle stores the results of unpacking all of the AAR (Android library files with .aar extension) that are listed as dependencies in your project. When gradle builds your project, it would seem that it creates a corresponding .gradle/caches/transforms-1/files-1.1[your dependency].aar directory for each AAR file you have listed as a dependency in your project's build.gradle file. Each subdirectory in there should contain the jar/classes.jar file (contains all of the dependency's java class files) as well as a res directory that contains all of the additional Android resources with which the jar file was packaged. My assumption is that all AAR files need to be deconstructed into the actual .jar file and associated resources in order for the java compiler to use them in building a project.