Gradle equivalent for maven properties - maven

Question

How can I add properties in Gradle which are similar to Maven's properties?
The use case is this: I want to have a file which declares all versions for repo dependencies so they are unified in a single place for a multi module project
compile group: 'javax.servlet.jsp.jstl', name: 'jstl', version: '1.2'
In Maven you can have properties like this:
<properties>
<jstlVersion>1.2</jstlVersion>
</properties>
Is it ok to use Gradle's external properties? Or just add them to the gradle.properties file?

Answer 1

Project properties defined in the root build file are available to subprojects. So if you have this in your root build.gradle file:
ext.commonsLangVersion = "2.4"
then you can use that in the dependencies {} block of a subproject like so:
dependencies {
implementation "commons-lang:commons-lang:${commonsLangVersion}"
}
You can also define such properties in the root gradle.properties file instead of the root build file. You use them in the same way.
If you really feel the need to put the versions in a separate file, you can do so. Simply add the following line to the root build file:
apply from: "dependencies.gradle"
Within the dependencies.gradle file, you can define the extra project properties as if they were in the root build file directly:
ext.commonsLangVersion = "2.4"
Note Normally, the values set in the build script take precedence over the values in gradle.properties. But if you set a value in the root build script as above, then any matching value in gradle.properties will override it in subprojects.
This behaviour is somewhat confusing and unique. For behaviour that is consistent with Gradle single-project builds you would need to use the following in the root build script:
allprojects {
apply from: "dependencies.gradle"
}
As a general rule of thumb, any given property should be declared/defined in either the build script or gradle.properties. If users want to override a particular property value, they can do so in $USER_HOME/.gradle/gradle.properties.
[EDIT I have updated the above note to clarify the actual behaviour]
One final thing: Gradle also allows you to control the versions of transitive dependencies via dependency constraints. You can also import Maven BOMs if you're using Gradle 4.6 or newer.

Answer 2

Found this as a possible solution, though I don't really like that uses relative path to the properties file.
Point 7 from here:
https://proandroiddev.com/make-your-build-gradle-great-again-c84cc172a654#8029