Using Gradle Composite Builds as a BuildSrc Replacement
Article Summary
Yury from Bumble Tech tackles a painful Gradle problem: buildSrc invalidates your entire build cache with every change. Here's how composite builds solve it without sacrificing IDE support.
The Bumble engineering team shares their migration from Gradle's buildSrc to composite builds. This deep dive explains why buildSrc's cache invalidation becomes a major bottleneck for large multi-module Android projects and provides a practical migration path that preserves autocompletion and type safety.
Key Takeaways
- buildSrc changes invalidate entire build cache, even for unaffected tasks
- Composite builds treat plugins as external dependencies, preserving cache
- Migration involves extracting buildSrc to separate included builds with plugins
- Autocompletion works identically using plugins block and extension approach
- Main tradeoff: plugin application order matters more than with buildSrc
Critical Insight
Composite builds eliminate buildSrc's cache invalidation problem while maintaining full IDE support, dramatically improving build times for large modular projects.
