Overview

Sometimes in your build script you have to import some variables and methods from another build scripts.

Let’s assume, we have the following structure:

.
├── build.gradle
└── sub
    ├── file1.gradle
    └── file2.gradle

the main build script (build.gradle file) will use files included in sub directory to import some variables and methods. To do this, we have to tell Gradle to have a look to these files. In the main script we have two tasks which list variables and methods available in other build scripts:

fileTree('sub').each { apply from: "${it}" }

task listVars << {
  println "var1 = $var1"
  println "var2 = $var2"
}

task listMethods << {
  println "m1 = ${m1(var1)}"
  println "m2 = ${m2(var2)}"
}

Then inside the sub/file1.gradle let’s define var1 variable and m1 closure in ext:

ext.var1 = 'val1'

ext.m1 = {
  "inside m1 $it"
}

The sub/file2.gradle will look similar:

ext.var2 = 'val2'

ext.m2 = {
  "inside m2 $it"
}

Gradle ext doesn’t allow to specify methods inside. However, thanks to Groovy language we can use closures instead of methods. To pass more than one parameter to the method -> in this case closure, we have to do this in this way:

ext.m3 = { val1, val2 ->
  // body...
}

and invoke it in this way:

m3('1', '2')