Type-safe Gradle task accessors #1350
Description
Problem
Currently, the only way of calling a specific Gradle task is to give it as string, e.g.:
It requires great attention to type them correctly. It's also risky to keep these as strings with regards to automatic dependency updates. E.g. see https://github.com/gradle-nexus/publish-plugin/releases/tag/v2.0.0:
Backward incompatible changes
- closeAndReleaseStagingRepository has been renamed to closeAndReleaseStagingRepositories for consistency
In this particular example, we don't call the task that was renamed, but if we did, Renovate would allow merging such change. The worst thing is that it would be caught at the moment of running the release workflow, which currently e.g. for github-workflows-kt happens once a month.
Idea
In the spirit of https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/kotlin_dsl.html#type-safe-accessors.
Rough notes, nothing formal:
./gradlew tasks --allreturns a list of tasks in a format like [1], there's also Gradle tooling API. We could extract the task hierarchy from there, and generate Kotlin type-safe accessors, e.g.jit-binding-server:runwould map to such Kotlin code:jitBindingServer.run- in the GitHub workflow using the Kotlin script, we would have a type-safe wrapper over Gradle that would allow passing only tasks defined in the previous step (+a way to refer to a task in an unsafe, string-based way), along with being able to pass extra arguments like
--no-configuration-cacheand other free-form arguments - sometimes we want to run the same task for several projects, e.g. when we loop across them (ref). Ideally the proposed feature would allow it, e.g. by understanding that if
project1andproject2expose aruntask, both projects should probably implement a common interface whererunin both cases is the same property in terms of API
Example
Before:
val librariesToPublish = listOf(
":shared-internal",
":github-workflows-kt",
":action-binding-generator",
)
librariesToPublish.forEach { library ->
run(
name = "Publish '$library' to Sonatype",
command = "./gradlew $library:publishToSonatype closeAndReleaseSonatypeStagingRepository --no-configuration-cache",
)
}After (rough idea, subject to discussion):
val librariesToPublish = listOf(
projects.sharedInternal,
projects.githubWorkflowsKt,
projects.actionBindingGenerator,
)
librariesToPublish.forEach { library ->
runGradle(
name = "Publish '$library' to Sonatype",
tasks = listOf(
library.publishToSonatype,
tasks.closeAndReleaseSonatypeStagingRepository,
),
flags = listOf(noConfigurationCache),
)
}[1]
> Task :tasks
------------------------------------------------------------
Tasks runnable from root project 'github-workflows-kt-monorepo'
------------------------------------------------------------
Application tasks
-----------------
automation:code-generator:run - Runs this project as a JVM application
jit-binding-server:run - Runs this project as a JVM application
jit-binding-server:runShadow - Runs this project as a JVM application using the shadow jar
jit-binding-server:startShadowScripts - Creates OS specific scripts to run the project as a JVM application using the shadow jar
Build tasks
-----------
assemble - Assembles the outputs of this project.
action-binding-generator:assemble - Assembles the outputs of this project.
automation:code-generator:assemble - Assembles the outputs of this project.
github-workflows-kt:assemble - Assembles the outputs of this project.
jit-binding-server:assemble - Assembles the outputs of this project.
maven-binding-builder:assemble - Assembles the outputs of this project.
...