Chapter 14
Multi-project builds

The powerful support for multi-project builds is one of Gradles unique selling points. This topic is also the intellectually most challenging.

14.1 Cross Project Configuration

Let’s start with a very simple multi-project build. After all Gradle is a general purpose build tool at its core. So the projects don’t have to be java projects. Our first examples are about marine life.

14.1.1 Defining Common Behavior

We have the following project tree¹ . This is a multi-project build with a root project water and a subproject bluewhale.

And where is the build script for the bluewhale project? In Gradle build scripts are optional. Obviously for a single project build, a project without a build script doesn’t make much sense. For multiproject builds the situation is different. Let’s look at the build script for the water project and execute it.:

Gradle allows you to access any project of the multi-project build from any build script. The Project API provides a method called project, which takes a path as an argument and returns the project object for this path. The capability to configure a project build from any build script we call Cross Project Configuration. Gradle implements this via Configuration Injection.

We are not that happy with the build script of the water project. It is inconvenient to add the task explicitly for every project. We can do better. Let’s first add another project called krill to our multi-project build.

Now we rewrite the water build script and boil it down to a single line.

Is this cool or is this cool? And how does this work? The Project API provides a property allprojects which returns a list with the current project and all its subprojects underneath it. If you call allprojects with a closure, the statements of the closure are delegated to the projects associated with allprojects. You could also do an iteration via allprojects.each, but that would be more verbose.

14.2 Subproject Configuration

The Project API also provides a property for accessing the subprojects only.

14.2.1 Defining Common Behavior

14.2.2 Adding Specific Behavior

You can add specific behavior on top of the common behavior. Usually we put the project specific behavior in the build script of the project where we want to apply this specific behavior. But as we have already seen, we don’t have to do it this way. We could add project specific behavior for the bluewhale project like this:

As we have said, we usually prefer to put project specific behavior into the build script of this project. Let’s refactor and also add some project specific behavior to the krill project.

14.2.3 Project Filtering

To show more of the power of Configuration Injection, lets’ add another project called tropicalFish and add more behavior to the build via the build script of the water project.

Filtering By Name

The configureProjects takes a list as an argument and applies the configuration to the projects in this list.

Filtering By Properties

Using the projectname for filtering is one option. Using dynamic project properties is another.

In the gradefile of the water project we use lateInitialize. This means that the closure we are passing get evaluated after the build scripts of the subproject are evaluated. As the property arctic is set in those build scripts, we have to do it this way. You will find more on this topic in section 14.5

14.3 Execution rules for multi-project builds

When we have executed the hello task from the root project dir things behaved in an intuitive way. All the hello tasks of the different projects were executed. Let’s switch to the bluewhale dir and see what happens if we execute Gradle from there.

The basic rule behind Gradles behavior is simple. Gradle looks down the hierarchy, starting with the current dir, for tasks with the name hello an executes them. One thing is very important to note. Gradle always evaluates every project of the multi-project build and creates all existing task objects. Then, according to the task name arguments and the current dir, Gradle filters the tasks which should be executed. Because of Gradles Cross Project Configuration every project has to be evaluated before any task gets executed. We will have a closer look at this in the next section. Let’s now have our last marine example. Let’s add a task to bluewhale and krill.

Here the output without the -q option

The build is executed from the water project. Neither water nor tropicalFish have a task with the name distanceToIceberg. Gradle does not care. The simple rule mentioned already above is: Execute all tasks down the hierarchy which have this name. Only complain if there is no such task!

14.4 Project and Task Paths

A project path has the following pattern: It starts always with a colon, which denotes the root project. The root project is the only project in a path that is not specified by its name. The path :bluewhale corresponds to the file system path water/project in the case of the example above.

The path of a task is simply its project path plus the task name. For example :bluewhale:hello. Within a project you can address a task of the same project just by its name. This is interpreted as a relative path.

Originally Gradle has used the ’/’ character as a natural path separator. With the introduction of directory tasks (see 4.3) this was no longer possible, as the name of the directory task contains the ’/’ character.

14.5 Dependencies - Which dependencies?

The examples from the last section were special, as the projects had no Execution Dependencies. They had only Configuration Dependencies. Here is an example where this is different:

14.5.1 Execution Dependencies

Dependencies and Execution Order

This did not work out. If nothing else is defined, Gradle executes the task in alphanumeric order. Therefore :consumer:action is executed before :producer:action. Let’s try to solve this with a hack and rename the producer project to aProducer.

Now we take the air out of this hack. We simply switch to the consumer dir and execute the build.

For Gradle the two action tasks are just not related. If you execute the build from the messages project Gradle executes them both because they have the same name and they are down the hierarchy. In the last example only one action was down the hierarchy and therefore it was the only task that got executed. We need something better than this hack.

Declaring Dependencies

We have now declared that the consumer project has an execution dependency on the producer project. For Gradle declaring execution dependencies between projects is syntactic sugar. Under the hood Gradle creates task dependencies out of them. You can also create cross project tasks dependencies manually by using the absolute path of the tasks.

The Nature of Project Dependencies

Let’s change the naming of our tasks and execute the build.

Uhps. Why does this not work? The dependsOn command is created for projects with a common lifecycle. Provided you have two Java projects were one depends on the other. If you trigger a compile for for the dependent project you don’t want that all tasks of the other project get executed. Therefore a dependsOn creates dependencies between tasks with equal names. To deal with the scenario above you would do the following:

14.5.2 Configuration Time Dependencies

Let’s have one more example with our producer-consumer build before we enter Java land. We add a property to the producer project and create now a configuration time dependency from consumer on producer.

The default evaluation order of the projects is alphanumeric (for the same nesting level). Therefore the consumer project is evaluated before the producer project and the key value of the producer is set after it is read by the consumer project. Gradle offers a solution for this.

The command evaluationDependsOn triggers the evaluation of producer before consumer is evaluated. The example is a bit contrived for the sake of showing the mechanism. In this case there would be an easier solution by reading the key property at execution time.

Configuration dependencies are very different to execution dependencies. Configuration dependencies are between projects whereas execution dependencies are always resolved to task dependencies. Another difference is that always all projects are configured, even when you start the build from a subproject. The default configuration order is top down, which is usually what is needed.

On the same nesting level the configuration order depends on the alphanumeric position. The most common use case is to have multi-project builds that share a common lifecycle (e.g. all projects use the Java plugin). If you declare with dependsOn a execution dependency between different projects, the default behavior of this method is to create also a configuration dependency between the two projects. Therefore it is likely that you don’t have to define configuration dependencies explicitly.

14.5.3 Real Life examples

Gradles multi-project features are driven by real life use cases. The first example for describing such a use case, consists of two webapplication projects and a parent project that creates a distribution out of them.² For the example we use only one build script and do cross project configuration.