Composite builds? Is it known to not work? Any wor...

# multiplatform

[Dominaezzz]

Composite builds? Is it known to not work? Any work-arounds? (publishToMavenLocal is a last resort.)

[Dico]

You are talking about includeBuild I assume

[Dico]

That doesn't allow using the same project notation

[Dico]

Instead you should use dependencySubstitution in settings.gradle.kts

[Dico]

I reckon you can Google now that you know what you're looking for

[Dominaezzz]

I should have been more specific. My project builds with gradle but IntelliJ marks everything as red.

[Alexey Belkov [JB]]

I assume it's a known problem https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-30285 (see also related issues)

[Nicholas Bilyk]

This burned me as well.
I've found that if the app project is jvm and not multi-platform, composite projects work fine (even if the library is multi-platform), it's only multi-platform app projects that have trouble.
I figured out an incredibly hacky workaround.
1) If your library is multi-project, then don't use project dependencies in your multi-platform multi-project library, use coordinates.
2) Create a sym-link to the library source within your app. Include the library projects in your settings.gradle.kts
3) Use dependency substitution to replace the module dependencies with project ones.

[Dominaezzz]

Interesting, is the sym link strictly necessary?

[Nicholas Bilyk]

I'm new to gradle, but I didn't think there was a way to include a sub-project unless it was relative to the root project

[Nicholas Bilyk]

so the sym-link lets me have multiple app projects that do this hacky composite builds using the same library project

[Nicholas Bilyk]

As I said, I'm new to gradle 🙂
Turns out the sym-link isn't necessary, you can do something like:

include(":otherproject:blah")
project(":otherproject:blah").projectDir = file("../../otherproject/blah")

[Nicholas Bilyk]

and of course this isn't a true composite workaround -- you don't get the build setup for that other project. (It doesn't follow its settings.gradle.kts, etc)