How Do We Run a Gradle Dependency Report for Plugins?

Question

Running gradle dependencies lists compile-time dependencies. IOW, it reports direct and transitive dependencies coming from the dependencies closure for the subproject.

What is the equivalent means of determining the transitive dependencies being used by Gradle plugins, the ones specified by the dependencies closure in the buildscript closure?

For example, suppose I have this top-level build.gradle file in an Android project:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        jcenter()
        maven { url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/' }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.3.1'
        classpath 'com.apollographql.apollo:gradle-plugin:0.3.1-SNAPSHOT'
    }
}

allprojects {
    repositories {
        jcenter()
        maven { url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/' }
    }
}

How do I find out what transitive dependencies are being pulled in by the com.apollographql.apollo:gradle-plugin:0.3.1-SNAPSHOT dependency?

Answer 1

Gradle provides various help tasks. A list of them is available via gradle tasks -all .

To access the buildscript dependencies, one can use the gradle buildEnvironment command, as described in the Gradle docs :

4.7.5. Listing project buildscript dependencies

Running gradle buildEnvironment visualises the buildscript dependencies of the selected project, similarly to how gradle dependencies visualises the dependencies of the software being built.

As addition, CommonsWare stated, that the command must be executed from the project directory.