How to find/remove unused dependencies in Gradle

Question

I wanted to find unused dependencies in my project. Is there a feature for this in Gradle, like in Maven?

Answer 1

I've had a lot of luck using the Gradle Dependency Analysis Plugin. To get started with it, add the following two things to your Gradle build script.

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven {
            url "https://plugins.gradle.org/m2/"
        }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath "com.github.nullstress:DependencyAnalysisPlugin:1.0.3"
    }
}

and

apply plugin: "dependencyAnalysis"

Once those are in place, run gradle analyze. If there are unused dependencies, you'll get a build failure that shows output similar to the text below, plus a list of the unused dependencies (both declared and transitive). The build failure is really handy if you want to enforce that there should be no unused dependencies via a CI build.

:foo:analyze FAILED

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':foo:analyze'.
> The project has unused declared artifacts