How do I depend on both releases and snapshots from Artifactory in Gradle?

Question

I feel like I'm missing something with Artifactory's 'virtual repos' concept. I'm new to both Artifactory and Gradle, having used Nexus and Maven before, and I don't remember ever encountering these types of issues in the past.

I feel like I have a fairly normal scenario, where I need mostly release dependencies, with a few snapshot dependencies during development.

The release dependencies are available from the virtual repo 'libs-release' (which includes 'libs-release-local', amongst other repos), and the snapshots are available in 'libs-snapshot'.

What I'm confused about is how I'm supposed to define this in Gradle, with the Artifactory plugin? From the docs and examples, I think I need something like:

artifactory {
  contextUrl = 'http://my-artifactory/artifactory'

  resolve {
    repository {
      repoKey = 'all-my-libs'
    }
  }
}

But that feels wrong - what's the point in the separate repos if I just lump them all together to use them? Comments in the answer to this question back up my concerns. That question talks about the /repo virtual repository, which for some reason isn't available to me. I get a 403 Forbidden if I try to use it.

Without Artifactory, I'd define multiple repositories like:

repositories {
  // other repos...
  maven { url 'http://my-artifactory/releases' }
  maven { url 'http://my-artifactory/snapshots' }
}

but when I include the Artifactory plugin, it seems that the repositories closure is either ignored or butchered in some way - with something similar to the example above, and without the resolve closure, Gradle seems to only be attempting to get dependencies from the http://my-artifactory/snapshots repo, and failing (with 409 Conflict) when it tries to find release dependencies.

So - what am I missing? Should I be asking the person with admin rights on Artifactory to create a new virtual repo combining libs-release and libs-snapshot? Or something else?

I'm facing the same problem. Did you find an solution without a virtual repository? — YishaiG
Not really; I've left that job now (which is always the easiest solution to a problem :)), but from memory, I think we gave up on the Artifactory plugin, and just used Gradle's standard respositories functionality, as suggested in the last paragraph of drorb's answer. — DaveyDaveDave
In my project it seems like it depends on the order in which the maven repositories are written in the file. If I want to resolve a release version, I have to put the release repo on top, if I want to build with a snapshot version, I have to put the snapshot repo on top. Not really a solution. — 最白目

Dror Bereznitsky Dror Bereznitsky · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-20T16:02:26

The resolution repository can be used in order to override all other repository definitions and making sure all artifacts are being resolved from a central repository.
This central repository is usually a virtual repository in Artifactory. Using a virtual repository has many benefits, for example it allows you to control which artifacts are can be resolved (by adding/removing repositories from the virtual) without changing the URL used in the build scripts.

Another use of the resolution repository is when the plugin is used for publishing build information to Artifactory. A list of all dependencies resolved during the build is collected as part of the build information.

Do notice, this is an optional feature. You may continue using the regular Gradle way of configuring repositories instead.

How do I depend on both releases and snapshots from Artifactory in Gradle?

2 Answers