Hi, I've just started implementing a plugin in Gradle, and some things are a little bit unclear. When would I use the

kotlin-dsl

plugin? Can I use it for developing plugins, or is it only intended to be used with convention plugins? It seems to add some nice extensions. When should I add @Input / @Output etc. annotations to Extensions/Tasks? It seems they are not strictly required? Thanks in advance

kotlin-dsl

applies

java-gradle-plugin

,

kotlin-dsl.base

, and

kotlin-dsl.precompiled-script-plugins

plugins

kotlin-dsl.base

plugin applies

embedded-kotlin

, adds

gradleKotlinDsl()

to the dependencies of

compileOnly

and

testImplementation

configurations, and configures the Kotlin DSL compiler plugins for example for proper SAM conversion for

Action

and similar, or for being able to assign to properties instead of using

.set(...)

and similar. So even if you do not use precompiled script plugins (which you probably meant when saying "convention plugins") the plugin does some quite useful stuff if you develop your plugin in Kotlin. So I would always apply the

kotlin-dsl

plugin if you develop anything related to build logic in Kotlin. input and output annotations you always need on tasks, there they are required or it will fail. On extensions they ususally do not make sense, as the extensions per-se do not have any input or output. Tasks do, Transforms do, and so on. If you use some part of an extension or an extension as

@Nested

input for a task, then it on the other hand might make sense. But usually those should be dedicated DSL objects and not the extension directly. It is most often a better idea to wire single properties in the extension to properties in the task.

Thanks for the great explanation!

Hm, indeed. Either I just have something not in mind right now which could well be too, or it is just superfluous on the extension property. I'd tend to the latter though.