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DevOps / Gradle8 Interview Questions

How do you configure a composite build with included builds?

A composite build lets one Gradle build transparently substitute a dependency with the output of another, separate Gradle build — useful for developing a library and the application consuming it side by side, without publishing the library to a repository first for every small change.

// settings.gradle of the consuming project
includeBuild '../shared-library'

// app/build.gradle
dependencies {
    implementation 'com.example:shared-library:1.0.0'   // resolved from the included build instead
}

Gradle automatically substitutes any dependency coordinate matching what the included build produces, so the consuming project's dependency declaration doesn't need to change at all — it looks like a normal published dependency, but Gradle builds it fresh from source as needed. This differs from a plain multi-project build's subprojects: an included build remains a fully independent, separately publishable Gradle build with its own settings.gradle, and can even be included by multiple unrelated consuming projects, which buildSrc and ordinary subprojects can't do.

What does includeBuild let a consuming project do with a dependency?
How does an included build differ from an ordinary subproject in the same multi-project build?

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