Reliable way of finding the latest version of a Gradle library

Question

in Gradle, when you include a library, you have to add the version number at the end, as such:

com.android.support:appcompat-v7:X.X.X

But a lot of times, understandably, the website for libraries don't tell you what the actual latest version number is on their front page, or in their "getting started" guide, and I end up spending a lot of time digging around to find the latest version number. If the library has a github page, I can usually find it there, but not all do, or at least they don't make that link easy to find either.

It feels like there should be a reliable and quicker way to do this, that I'm not aware of. like a certain tab on the website I should be looking under, or a key word I should search for. I think I just don't know the correct terminology here because my background is in EE.

Answer 1

Most artifacts pulled by Gradle are going to be coming from Maven Central probably. You can go to this site to search it. Simply type in the artifact ID and search. You can find all the versions of it there. Some projects may change the group ID or artifact ID across major versions, so be on the lookout for similarly named projects.

If your project is using a different repository (check the build.gradle) then that repository will probably also have a way to search it to see if there is anything newer.

Unfortunately neither of these is automatic and requires human intervention -- but when projects change group ID or artifact ID across versions for whatever reason then there is not a simple way to automate it.

There is a plugin that makes a report for you (I found this by a simple Google search). I haven't tried it so I can't speak to how well it works. It won't catch those "trickier" ones though.