How to migrate an existing project to refreshVersions

• Status: I wrote the documentation of the migration process as I imagine it.
• Implementation: I have a draft implementation of ./gradlew refreshVersions --show missing-versions in the branch poc-all-versions

---

refreshVersions migration

As described in Adding Dependencies, refreshVersions has an opt-in mechanism. It only manages dependencies that were declared with a version placeholder _

dependencies {
   implementation("com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp:_") // OK, managed
   implementation("com.squareup.moshi:moshi:1.9.3") // Harcoded, not managed
}

The chicken and egg problem

If you migrate an existing project, all dependencies versions will be hardcoded, so refreshVersions will manage nothing

## versions.properties

# no version whatsoever here :'(

So how do you migrate?

You could replace directly all hardcoded versions with the placeholder

// build.gradle
dependencies {
   implementation("com.squareup.okhttp3:okhttp:_")
-   implementation("com.squareup.moshi:moshi:1.9.3")
+   implementation("com.squareup.moshi:moshi:_")
}

Sync Gradle.

You will then notice an unwanted side-effect:

## versions.properties
+version.moshi=1.11.0

That’s not good, moshi was silently updated to the latest available version instead of the one that the build was using 🤨

So here is what you do instead

Add missing versions

Run the following command

$ ./gradlew refreshVersions --show missing-versions
> Task refreshVersions
Following versions are currently missing in versions.properties:

version.okhttp=4.8.3
version.moshi=1.11.0

Use the output of this command to modify manually versions.properties

## versions.properties
+version.okhttp=4.8.3
+version.moshi=1.11.0

Replace hardcoded dependencies versions

The next step is to find and replace all hardcoded versions with the placeholder _.

Depending on the size of the project, this could be simple or a bit tricky.

Fortunately, we have another command that will guide you in this process

$ ./gradlew refreshVersions --show harcoded-versions
> Task refreshVersions
Searching for hardcoded versions...

# core/build.gradle
Found 1 hardcoded dependency:
moshi

# app/build.gradle.kts
Found 3 harcoded dependencies:
cardview constraintlayout picaso

Search those dependencies and replace the hardcoded version with _

// core/build.gradle
-   implementation 'com.squareup.moshi:moshi:1.9.3'
+   implementation 'com.squareup.moshi:moshi:_'

// app/build.gradle.kts
-   implementation("com.squareup.moshi:moshi:1.9.3")
-   implementation("androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:1.2.0")
-   implementation("com.squareup.picasso:picaso:1.0.0")
+   implementation("com.squareup.moshi:moshi:_")
+   implementation("androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:_")
+   implementation("com.squareup.picasso:picaso:_")

Check again that you have no hard-coded version

$ ./gradlew refreshVersions --show harcoded-versions
> Task refreshVersions
Searching for hardcoded versions...

# core/build.gradle
No harcoded version

# app/build.gradle.kts
No harcoded version

Commit your changes

Run $ ./gradlew refreshVersions

At that point, your project is setup correctly. You have the same versions as before but can now lookup for available updates

$ ./gradlew refreshVersions
$ cat versions.properties
## versions.properties

version.okhttp=4.8.3
## # available=4.9.0

version.moshi=1.11.0
## #available=1.13.0 

[LouisCAD]

We can do better (though we have great ideas and a clear explanation of the problem).

Please let me comment more in depth this weekend. I’ll prioritize this over reviewing the website updates.

[THEAccess]

From my experience the best migration can be done with Regex and Find&Replace. \${Versions\.[A-Za-z]*} worked well