Declarative project structure

This implements the ideas described in the spec

The spike implements new behavior and DSL as a settings plugin applied to some sample projects.

Ideas that show promise will be copied into future prototypes or Gradle itself.

New ideas

Auto-detection

In simple project layouts, Gradle should be able to auto-detect all projects that need to be included.

Physical-location first

The existing APIs require users to specify a logical path that is interpretted as a physical path by convention.

This DSL explores ideas to use the physical layout to include subprojects instead.

Test cases

These are common layouts we found in real projects.

All of the test cases should be able to run on a recent version of Gradle. You can inspect the list of included projects by looking at gradle projects.

explicit-only

In this example, all subprojects are explicitly included with a flat logical path and physical path.

logical-layout

In this example, the logical path (:myorg:app) for the subproject is very different from its physical path.

platforms-subprojects

This example is close to Gradle's layout. Subprojects are automatically included from other directories than the root.

single-project

This example only shows that the equivalent of rootProject.name is set outside the layout.

spring-boot-like

This example follows a similar layout to Spring boot. There's a mix of subprojects that are found in subdirectories and under other projects.

subprojects-dir

This example shows all subprojects being auto-discovered under a subdirectory (subprojects/).

top-level-projects

This example can auto-detect all subprojects with build files without any explicit configuration.