Solution around gradle cache issues with snapshots? - maven

Question

When publishing snapshots to artifactory/mavenLocal, projects won't pick up the latest snapshot. This requires deleting the jar from ~/.gradle/cache
Maven has a feature to set timestamps for snapshots. how would this work with gradle cache?

Answer 1

There are two things to consider in resolving your issue:
How Gradle handles/recognizes snapshots
How to override Gradle's default behavior
Some background on how Gradle recognizes/handles snapshots
By default, Gradle will refresh a snapshot dependency every 24 hours.
Gradle will automatically recognize a dependency as a snapshot if the version ends with the -SNAPSHOT suffix. For example:
dependencies {
compile group: "aGroup", name: "anArtifact", version: "1.0-SNAPSHOT"
}
However, if the dependency's version string does not end with -SNAPSHOT Gradle needs to be told it's a snapshot with the changing parameter. For example:
dependencies {
compile group: "aGroup", name: "anArtifact", version: "1.0", changing: true
}
Overriding how often Gradle downloads snapshots
The only mechanism for overriding the default 24 hour policy is to configure Gradle to invalidate dependency cache (and thus download a new SNAPSHOT) more frequently. For example:
configurations.all {
resolutionStrategy.cacheChangingModulesFor 0, 'seconds'
}
Dynamically versioned dependency cache will need to be configured separately
If you're using any dynamic versions, such as:
dependencies {
compile group: "aGroup", name: "anArtifact", version: "1.+", changing: true
}
You'll need to configure cache invalidation for those dependencies separately, like this:
configurations.all {
resolutionStrategy.cacheChangingModulesFor 0, 'seconds'
resolutionStrategy.cacheDynamicVersionsFor 0, 'seconds'
}
Build performance impact
One thing to note is that the shorter the period of time a dependency is cached the more frequently Gradle will retrieve that artifact. If caching is disabled altogether, it will grab the dependency during each execution.