Gradle - Reusing buildscript Repositories

Gradle is a leading build tool. It gets libraries from the specified repositories and downloads them. If you’re using plugins, you’ll have to define repositories twice (in both buildscript.repositories and repositories)

It isn’t easy to maintain multiple definitions of the same repository, especially in an organisation where repository definition can span multiple lines. Also, there can be many repositories: team-wise, company-wide public or private, 3rd parties vendors, open source etc.

Avoid doing work twice; Define Repository Once and use it all over.

Gradle, thankfully, enables you to name your repositories and gives a nice API for selecting repositories by name.

buildscript {
  repositories {

    // start of definition
    maven {
      // Define name of repository
      name 'myRepository1'
      url 'https://repo.mycompany.com/maven'
      metadataSources: {
        mavenPom()
      }
      credentials {
        username "user"
        password "password"
      }
    }
    //end of definition
  }
}

Selective Repository

Use the getByName() API to retrieve the above-mentioned repository in repositories section, as illustrated in the code below:

// this line is going to save the effort
repositories.add(buildscript.repositories.getByName('myRepository1'))

All Repository

Use the following code if you want to reuse all of the defined repositories of buildscript:

repositories = buildscript.repositories