Gradle build plugin

Overview

This tactic runs a Gradle init script to output the dependencies in each Gradle subproject. Mechanically, this tactic:

1. Unpacks an init script to a temporary directory. Elsewhere in this document, we refer to this as "the plugin".
2. Invokes the plugin with gradle jsonDeps -Ipath/to/init.gradle.
3. Parses the JSON output of the plugin.

The plugin works by iterating through configurations, getting the resolution result for each configuration, and then serializing those dependencies into JSON.

Debugging

Manually view plugin output

If the plugin doesn't appear to be working correctly, you can run it directly:

1. Download it from this repository.
2. Run the command gradle -I$PATH_TO_SCRIPT jsonDeps, where $PATH_TO_SCRIPT is the location to which the plugin was downloaded.

For example, with the plugin downloaded to /tmp/jsondeps.gradle, run (from within your project's working directory):

gradle -I/tmp/jsondeps.gradle jsonDeps

Usually, this output provides additional information on what is causing the build to fail. This information is provided by Gradle and is not related to FOSSA.

Debugging the plugin

If the plugin itself appears to not be working based on its output, please send in a support request with the following information:

1. If available, the "complete report" written by Gradle when you ran the script directly. This is usually linked in the Gradle output with the message "See the complete report at {file path}".
2. The commands you executed to run the plugin directly, and the verbatim output of those commands.
3. A minimal reproduction case for us to run locally so we can debug the script on our systems.

"Configuration cache problems found in this build"

The plugin output may contain text like the below:

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* Where:
Initialization script 'jsondeps.gradle' line: 190

* What went wrong:
Configuration cache problems found in this build.

This is a Gradle-specific issue with the "configuration cache" feature in relation to the plugin FOSSA uses. The Gradle configuration cache is enabled by setting org.gradle.unsafe.configuration-cache=true in your gradle.properties.

According to the Gradle documentation, the configuration cache is not compatible with all "Gradle plugins and features"; the plugin used by FOSSA CLI appears to be one of them.

Specific resolution steps depend on your project and Gradle version, but one possible resolution is to set org.gradle.unsafe.configuration-cache-problems=warn in your gradle.properties. This turns configuration cache problems into warnings instead of errors, so they stop preventing the project from building when FOSSA CLI attempts to analyze it.