Groovy/build.gradle: Get if Debug or Release

Question

I'm looking for a simple way to find out if an Android App is being built for Debug or Release mode inside my library's build.gradle script (in a task).

I have a task called prepareHermes that extracts a.aar file. I currently always extract the debug variant, but in Release builds I want to use the release variant:

  task prepareHermes() {
    doLast {
      def IS_DEBUG = // TODO: here
      def aarName = IS_DEBUG ? "hermes-debug.aar" : "hermes-release.aar"
      def hermesAAR = file("$hermesPackagePath/android/${aarName}")

      if (!hermesAAR.exists()) {
        throw new GradleScriptException("The hermes-engine npm package is missing \"android/${aarName}\"", null)
      }

      def soFiles = zipTree(hermesAAR).matching({ it.include "**/*.so" })

      copy {
        from soFiles
        from "$reactNative/ReactAndroid/src/main/jni/first-party/hermes/Android.mk"
        into "$thirdPartyNdkDir/hermes"
      }
    }
  }

This task is later used in various places (see full code here ), so making two separate tasks ( prepareHermesDebug and prepareHermesRelease ) is a bit inconvenient since I then have a ton of duplicate code. (this task is a dependency for a few other tasks, as seen in the full code.)

Answer 1

One approach is to check if any of the executed tasks has expected build type in their name:

gradle.startParameter.taskRequests.toString().contains('Debug')

Answer 2

You also can generate as many tasks as you like:

[ 'debug', 'release' ].each{ name ->

  task "prepareHermes-$name"{
    doLast {
      def aarName = "hermes-${name}.aar"
      def hermesAAR = file "$hermesPackagePath/android/$aarName"
      // the rest...
    }
  }

}

Then if you run gradlew tasks , you will see prepareHermes-debug and prepareHermes-release in the output

Answer 3

Use gradle.startParameter.taskRequests to determine current variant is NOT a nice idea.**

1. Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) is built over Gradle Platform.
2. Android Variant is a concept from Upper layer.
3. Gradle gradle.startParameter.taskRequests API is Under layer, and it's not Variant Aware.

It does not support the scenario like:

./gradlew clean assemble

The above command produces both Debug and Release artifacts which breaks the check script using taskRequests .

making two separate tasks (prepareHermesDebug and prepareHermesRelease) is a bit inconvenient...

Yes, we are going to take onVariants{} API to do similar thing. Basically, it iterates all variant objects for you to get a chance to register Variant Aware task respectively:

androidComponents {
    onVariants { variant ->
        project.tasks.register<AarUploadTask>("${variant.name}AarUpload") {
            aar.set(variant.artifacts.get(SingleArtifact.AAR))
        }
    }
}

abstract class AarUploadTask: DefaultTask() {

    @get:InputFile
    abstract val aar: RegularFileProperty

    @TaskAction
    fun taskAction() {
        println("Uploading ${aar.get().asFile.absolutePath} to fantasy server...")
    }
}

Through the new Variant&Artifact APIs above(In Kotlin DSL sorry, but you can easily transform it to groovy), you can get the corresponding .aar of the Variant and pass it to a custom task conveniently(no hardcode any more).

Check full scripts from android/gradle-receipt , and more API doc from Extend the Android Gradle plugin .