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Keeping dependencies up to date in Gradle toml files

TL;DR – This post shows you how to create a script that checks for available upgrades to third party dependencies in a Gradle libs.versions.toml file

Managing dependencies – What’s missing?

Keeping dependencies up to date is part of ongoing technical debt. It’s not the most glamorous task, but neglect it and you will find yourself in trouble sooner or later.

That’s why it’s important to make it as easy for the organization to “do the right thing” and keep those dependencies up to date with the least friction possible. A great tool for this is Dependabot, which automatically creates PRs with suggested upgrades. We use it a lot. Unfortunately, Dependabot has a limitation – currently, it does not support upgrading *.toml files. We won’t know that it’s time to upgrade libraries listed in the file!

What’s a toml file?

toml is a file format for storing configurations. It’s equivalent to a json, yaml or ini file, and is easily and clearly parseable. A full description of it’s capabilities can be found in the toml project page.

Toml & Gradle

In Gradle, we can define a libs.versions.toml file and use it as a version catalog that is shared between projects. This is great for aligning the versions of third party dependencies and making sure all projects work with the same third party versions. This prevents all sort of nasty bugs that we would get when depending on different versions of the same dependency that we really don’t want to run into.

Let’s take a look at a sample libs.versions.toml file:

[versions]
aws = "1.12.311"
commonsIo = "2.11.0"
...

[libraries]
awsSdkCore = { module = "com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-core", version.ref = "aws" }
awsSdkS3 = { module = "com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-s3", version.ref = "aws" }
awsSdkSqs = { module = "com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-sqs", version.ref = "aws" }
awsSdkSns = { module = "com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-sns", version.ref = "aws" }
commonsIo = { module = "commons-io:commons-io", version.ref = "commonsIo" }
...


As you can see, it’s fairly straightforward and very readable: The versions section defines the version number, while the libraries section defines all our dependencies and uses the version.ref property to refer to the version, enabling us to define the same version for multiple dependencies that belong in the same “family”.

We now need to add a reference to the libs.versions.toml file in our Gradle build. We do that in the settings.gradle.kts file:

dependencyResolutionManagement {
  versionCatalogs {
    create("externalLibs") {
      from(files("gradle/libs.versions.toml"))
    }
  }
}

Now, we can reference the versions using the externalLibs prefix in our build.gradle.kts file:

dependencies {
    implementation(externalLibs.awsSdkCore)
}

And that’s it!

Creating a script

OK, so back to our problem: We can’t use Dependabot to generate PRs for updating the libs.versions.toml file. So what can we do that’s the best next thing?

Reviewing the file for available updates is a grueling task. The project that I work on has over 100 different versions in the toml file. Reviewing them one by one and checking each one for the latest version in https://mvnrepository.com/ is not scalable. Our dependencies will probably fall into neglect if we use this approach.

If we had a script that parses the toml file and compares the current version to the latest available version, we’d have a tool that shows us the latest version that’s available. Moreover, if we commit this file, we would be able to see what’s changed since the last commit, next time we run it.

After searching for such a script and and not finding one, I decided to write one myself.

What are the steps that we need the script to perform?

  1. Extract a list of all the third parties.
  2. Look up the current version for each of these third parties.
  3. Look up the latest release for each of them.
  4. Compare the current version to the latest version and output the diff to a file.

With a few exceptions, all of the third parties are hosted in https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/ where each one has a maven-metadata.xml which contains a tag called <release> which holds the latest GA version. That’s our data source for the latest version.

Initially I started out trying to implement this script using bash. After re-learning bash for the n-th time (always fun…), this was the result (feel free to skip to details here):

grep -E '^.* ?= ?"[^"]*"' libs.versions.toml | \
grep -v module | \
sed -E 's/([^= ]*) ?= ?"([^"]*)".*/\1 \2/g' | \
awk 'FNR == NR { a[$1] = $2 ; next } { print $1 " " a[$2] }' - <( \
  grep module libs.versions.toml | \
  grep version | \
  sed -E 's/^.*{ ?module ?= ?"([^"]*)", ?version\.ref ?= ?"([^"]*)".*/\1 \2/g' \
) | \
sort | \
awk 'FNR == NR { a[$1] = $2 ; next } $2 != a[$1] { print $1 ": " a[$1] " -> " $2 }' - <( \
  grep module libs.versions.toml | \
  grep version | \
  sed -E 's/.*module ?= ?"([^"]*)".*/\1/g' | \
  tr .: '/' | \
  sed 's/^/https\:\/\/repo\.maven\.apache\.org\/maven2\//g' | \
  sed 's/$/\/maven-metadata.xml/g' | \
  xargs curl -s | \
  egrep '(groupId|artifactId|release)' | \
  xargs -n3 | \
  sed 's/\<groupId\>\(.*\)\<\/groupId\> \<artifactId\>\(.*\)\<\/artifactId\> \<release\>\(.*\)\<\/release\>/\1\:\2\ \3/g' | \
  sort \
) > latest_available_upgrades.txt

This script works, but… As one of my reviewers pointed out in the code review (Thanks Shay!) this is hardly maintainable. Good luck debugging this or just understanding what is does.

Now that the proof of concept was, well… proven, I rewrote this in friendlier language: Kotlin script. For those of you not familiar with Kotlin script, it’s just plain Kotlin with some added annotations to help compile the script. You can run it from the command line without any prior compilation.

Here’s the same code, but in readable Kotlin script:

#!/usr/bin/env kotlin

@file:Repository("https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/")
@file:DependsOn("org.tomlj:tomlj:1.1.0")
@file:DependsOn("org.apache.httpcomponents.core5:httpcore5:5.1.4")

import org.apache.hc.core5.http.HttpHost
import org.apache.hc.core5.http.impl.bootstrap.HttpRequester
import org.apache.hc.core5.http.impl.bootstrap.RequesterBootstrap
import org.apache.hc.core5.http.io.entity.EntityUtils
import org.apache.hc.core5.http.io.support.ClassicRequestBuilder
import org.apache.hc.core5.http.protocol.HttpCoreContext
import org.apache.hc.core5.util.Timeout
import org.tomlj.Toml
import org.xml.sax.InputSource
import java.io.FileReader
import java.io.StringReader
import java.net.URI
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory

val coreContext: HttpCoreContext = HttpCoreContext.create()
val httpRequester: HttpRequester = RequesterBootstrap.bootstrap().create()
val timeout: Timeout = Timeout.ofSeconds(5)

val mavenTarget: HttpHost = HttpHost.create(URI("https://repo1.maven.org"))

val dbf: DocumentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance()
val xpathFactory: XPathFactory = XPathFactory.newInstance()
val releasePath = xpathFactory.newXPath().compile("//metadata//versioning//release")!!

main()

fun main() {
  val toml = FileReader("./libs.versions.toml").use { file ->
    Toml.parse(file)
  }

  val versions = toml.getTable("versions")!!.toMap()
  val libraries = toml.getTable("libraries")!!

  val (currentVersionRefs, missingVersions) = libraries.keySet().associate {
    val module = libraries.getString("$it.module")!!
    val versionRef = libraries.getString("$it.version.ref")
    module to versionRef
  }.entries.partition { it.value != null }

  val currentVersions = currentVersionRefs.associate { it.key to versions.getValue(it.value) }

  val latestVersions = currentVersions.mapValues { (packageName, _) ->
    getLatestVersion(packageName, mavenTarget, httpRequester, timeout, coreContext, dbf, releasePath)
  }

  // Compare current to latest version and print if different
  currentVersions.toSortedMap().forEach { (packageName, currentVersion) ->
    val latestVersion = latestVersions.getValue(packageName)
    if (currentVersion != latestVersion) {
      println("$packageName: $currentVersion -> $latestVersion")
    }
  }

  if (missingVersions.isNotEmpty()) {
    println("\n--- Missing version.ref - Need to check manually ---\n")
    println(missingVersions.map { it.key }.sortedBy { it }.joinToString("\n"))
  }

}

fun getLatestVersion(packageName: String, mavenTarget: HttpHost?, httpRequester: HttpRequester, timeout: Timeout?, coreContext: HttpCoreContext?, dbf: DocumentBuilderFactory, releasePath: XPathExpression): String {
  val (groupId, artifactId) = packageName.split(":")
  val path = "${groupId.replace(".", "/")}/$artifactId"
  val request = ClassicRequestBuilder.get()
      .setHttpHost(mavenTarget).setPath("/maven2/$path/maven-metadata.xml").build()
  val xmlString = httpRequester.execute(mavenTarget, request, timeout, coreContext).use { response ->
    if (response.code != 200) return "Could not find value in Maven Central. Need to check manually."
    EntityUtils.toString(response.entity)
  }
  val db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder()
  val document = db.parse(InputSource(StringReader(xmlString)))
  return releasePath.evaluate(document, XPathConstants.STRING).toString()
}

Notes:

  • Third party libraries that were used: https://github.com/tomlj/tomlj & https://github.com/apache/httpcomponents-client
  • There are a few cases in the toml’s libraries section where we still manage dependencies via the dependencyManagement section of the build.gradle.kts file and the library’s entry does not have a version.ref property. These are not handled by the script and appear in a separate “Missing version.ref” section.
  • There are a few libraries that are not hosted in Maven Central’s repo but rather in Jitpack’s repo – These are also not handled and a “Could not find value in Maven Central” message is printed instead.

Running this script as 

./check_latest_versions.main.kts > latest_available_upgrades.txt

we get the following output:

com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-core: 1.12.311 -> 1.12.326
com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-s3: 1.12.311 -> 1.12.326
com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-sns: 1.12.311 -> 1.12.326
com.amazonaws:aws-java-sdk-sqs: 1.12.311 -> 1.12.326

We can see immediately that our AWS lib’s version is not up to date. After committing latest_available_upgrades.txt, next time we run this script, we will also know when AWS publishes a new version of the libraries.

Summary

As you can see, this script automates the chore of checking for third party updates and reduces it to running a single command. It doesn’t create a PR as Dependabot does, but for most cases, it gets us most of the way towards quickly identifying which dependencies require an upgrade.