Hi there Seeing an issue with composite builds in intellij s Gradle Community #community-support

Hi there. Seeing an issue with composite builds i...

JamesX

08/30/2025, 1:45 AM

Hi there. Seeing an issue with composite builds in intellij since upgrading to gradle 8. My project has both a

buildSrc

project and an "external" build which creates some gradle plugins. It used to be that I could enable Composite Build in the intellij UI, and then it would resolve my plugin classes back to source when navigating from buildscripts (very nice!) ...but, since upgrading to gradle 8, it seems that my

buildSrc

is always listed as a composite, which prevents intellij from showing the option to enable composites (if I enable composites in settings.gradle, the gui option is normally removed, but it also doesn't work properly in IDE). So, does anyone have any ideas or suggests? gpt suggested removing

buildSrc/settings.gradle

but that didn't help, and manually printing the included builds shows nothing. I'll attach the xml I pulled from

.idea/gradle.xml

in a thread, in case it helps.

JamesX

08/30/2025, 1:45 AM

Copy code

<compositeConfiguration>
          <compositeBuild compositeDefinitionSource="SCRIPT">
            <builds>
              <build path="$PROJECT_DIR$/buildSrc" name="buildSrc">
                <projects>
                  <project path="$PROJECT_DIR$/buildSrc" />
                </projects>
              </build>
            </builds>
          </compositeBuild>
        </compositeConfiguration>

Vampire

08/30/2025, 10:30 AM

I usually define my composite builds in the settings script, not in the IDE and never had problems. But I also for ages don't use

buildSrc

anymore, but a proper composite build for build logic. But anyway, if you can only define one composite build in IDE and not multiple, I'd say that is an IDE bug.

JamesX

08/30/2025, 3:08 PM

well, "never had problems" -> are you getting "jump to definition" (ctrl+b on linux) going to sources or compiled classes? Whenever I set the composite in gradle buildscript, I usually wind up getting sent to compiled class files, when I want to jump to source. Maybe I'm doing something else wrong if "includeBuild() in settings.gradle" gives the premium 'link to source' behavior for others...

Vampire

08/30/2025, 5:13 PM

Of course to sources. That's one of the main use-cases for composite builds, that you have both projects open on the same IDE and can develop them together further even if they are released separately and normally used via binary dependency

TheGoesen

09/01/2025, 2:24 PM

@JamesX I use intellij and gradle 8 and for me me it mostly "just works". So if you use includeBuild('') in your settings and sync you are getting codehighlighting out of the box without any further setup. However intellij has a bunch of bugs which may or may not apply to your specific setup. Sometimes intellijs caches even go completly haywire the only thing that can fix it is a new working copy

Vampire

09/01/2025, 2:42 PM

IJ also gets its caches corrupted without using composite builds occasionally. Latest when you do "Invalidate Caches and Restart" they are fine again though. Sometimes also a "Sync Gradle Project" or "Rebuild Project" is enough, or "Repair IDE on file" for a specific file.

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