The Android Gradle Plugin: Command Line

We recommend using Intellij IDEA to edit the Android Gradle Plugin.

Building from the command line

To ensure you are using the right version of Gradle, please use the ./gradlew Gradle wrapper script) in the tools/ directory to build.

To build the Android Gradle Plugin, run (from the tools/ directory)

$ ./gradlew :publishAndroidGradleLocal

(Tip: Gradle allows camel-case abbreviations for task names. So, to execute the command above, you can simply run ./gradlew :pAGL).

The above command publishes the plugin to a local Maven repository located in ../out/repo/

To build the Android Gradle Plugin with the data binding runtime libraries, run ./gradlew :publishLocal

Test your build

To run the tests for everything built with Gradle, including the local build of the plugin, run the following command

$ ./gradlew check

To run a specific integration test, run:

$ ./gradlew :base:build-system:integration-test:<integration test module>:<integration test task name> \
    --tests=<specific integration test>

Editing the plugin

The code of the plugin and its dependencies is located in tools/base. We recommend using Intellij IDEA to edit the Android Gradle Plugin.

There are tests in multiple modules of the project. tools/base/build-system/integration-test contains the integration tests and compose of the majority of the testing of the plugin. To run the integration tests. run:

$ ./gradlew :base:build-system:integration-test:application:test

To run just a single test, you can use the --tests argument with the test class you want to run. e.g.:

$ ./gradlew :b:b-s:integ:app:test --tests *.BasicTest

To compile the samples manually, publish the plugin and its libraries first with $ ./gradlew :publishLocal (Also, running check, :base:build-system:integration-test:application:test, etc. first run :publishAndroidGradleLocal and :publishLocal as needed).

Debugging

For debugging unit tests, we recommend directly using Intellij IDEA.

You can do the same from the command line: use the following to allow a remote debugger to be attached.

$ ./gradlew :base:gradle:test --debug-jvm --tests='*.BasicTest'

For debugging plugin code when run locally:

$ cd a-sample-project  # Make sure build.gradle points at your local repo,
                       # as described in the main README.
$ ./gradlew --no-daemon -Dorg.gradle.debug=true someTask

If you need to debug an integration test while running within the integration tests framework, you can do:

$ DEBUG_INNER_TEST=1 ./gradlew :b:b-s:integ:app:test --tests TestTaskClassName

This will silently wait for you to connect a debugger on port 5006. You can combine this with --debug-jvm flag (which expects a debugger on port 5005) to debug both the sides of the tooling API at the same time.