Gradle rules

[BraisGabin]

Gradle has a lot of foot gun apis. An example: TaskContainer.create instead of TaskContainer.register. And a lot of special ways to declare things.

I think that detekt should be able to help to write better gradle code (plugins and scripts). But I'm not sure how. Probably with a configuration of forbidden method call a lot of use cases would be solved. But it's difficult to share configurations. Other option is a first/third party plugin with a copy of forbidden method call and its own default values. Easier to share.

But we would still have another issue. Our gradle plugin doesn't have a task to check the gradle scripts. That's a problem because Forbidden method call needs type solving. The work around would be to use the cli. But it's difficult to configure.

Should we create issues to track the different stoppers? Does it have sense to use detekt for this? Are there other options out there? (I did a little research and found nothing)

[schalkms]

In my opinion, it makes sense to include a Gradle ruleset in detekt.

[cortinico]

That's a great idea. Perhaps we can get inspired by some of rules from:
https://github.com/runningcode/gradle-doctor

[3flex]

It's a good idea, but before duplicating effort, take a look at https://github.com/autonomousapps/gradle-best-practices-plugin. It already has some checks for create instead of register, plus others.

The author of this plugin also wrote the popular dependency analysis plugin (https://github.com/autonomousapps/dependency-analysis-android-gradle-plugin).

[3flex]

This doesn't check Gradle scripts though AFAIK, just Gradle plugins. But I don't think setting detekt up to check Gradle scripts with type resolution will be easy.