How to never show alpha/beta updates versions that are currently stable

[ColtonIdle]

I basically sort deps into two buckets.

1. Always stable, never try alpha/beta
2. Always try bleeding edge alpha/beta

This plugin out of the box is great for 2, but I do want to be able to say "Hey if I'm using a stable version, don't show me alpha/beta/etc versions" How would I do this?

[ben-manes]

It sounds like you'd want to use rejectVersionsIf (which is shorthand for a component selection rule). This will reject newer versions that do not match the predicate and evaluate the next version, until it finds an acceptable match. Note that an suggested isNonStable function is supplied in the readme, but we don't classify as such because there are many different versioning styles in the wild.

Example 2: disallow release candidates as upgradable versions from stable versions

tasks.named("dependencyUpdates").configure {
  rejectVersionIf {
    isNonStable(it.candidate.version) && !isNonStable(it.currentVersion)
  }
}

[ColtonIdle]

@ben-manes confirmed that it works! Wooo. No longer do I have a list of like 20 dependencies that I won't actually update. Thank you!

[ColtonIdle]

@ben-manes I started a new project and so I copied the above into my new project and I can't tell if it's working because it's telling me these two dependencies are out of date

The following dependencies have later milestone versions:
 - androidx.test.espresso:espresso-core [3.4.0 -> 3.5.0-alpha01]
     https://developer.android.com/testing
 - androidx.test.ext:junit [1.1.3 -> 1.1.4-alpha01]
     https://developer.android.com/testing

Any ideas why these two are getting past the filter?

[ColtonIdle]

Ah. Figured it out.

I had

tasks.withType<DependencyUpdatesTask> {
    rejectVersionIf { (candidate.group == "org.jacoco") && (candidate.version != currentVersion) }
    rejectVersionIf { isNonStable(candidate.version) && !isNonStable(currentVersion) }
}

but I need to combine them into a single rejectVersionIf statement.

[ben-manes]

nope, it should be rejected. If you use a groovy console and try !('1.1.4-alpha01' ==~ /^[0-9,.v-]+(-r)?$/​)​​ then it returns true (reject). You can use --info to see Gradle's logs or just print during the callback.

[ben-manes]

oh congrats. Yes its not composable unfortunately.