I'm ashamed to say that I've never really got to grips with included builds. I asked ChatGPT for a way to be able to include / uninclude a build globally without risking committing something accidentally, and it came up with this:

settings.gradle.kts

if (file("settings-include.gradle.kts").exists()) {
  apply(from = "settings-include.gradle.kts", optional = true)
}

.gitignore

settings-include.gradle.kts

settings-include.gradle.kts

includeBuild("../other-project")

Then you can just comment that line in

settings-include.gradle.kts

in and out. Is this how everyone else is doing it?

I commit it accidentally 50% of the times 😅

That's why I `.gitignore`'d it

I just edit my

settings.gradle.kts

file because I want to see it in

git status

and I don't mind committing it accidentally because my CI will catch it quickly

I doubt that "this is how everyone else is doing it". I've never seen such construct actually. An I would also never use it, for example because it uses a legacy script plugin which is highly discouraged and has quite some quirks. Maybe no quirks for this one-liner, but still I'd not use them. Like Martin I just edit my settings script, just that I never accidentally checked it in because I usually look over the changes again I'm going to commit and latest by then always caught it so far, but usually I anyway use

git add -p

and add hunk by hunk that I want to commit unless I do really big changes. It also depends on what you do the composite build for. If it is just to have both projects in the same IDE and connected, you could also just define the composite build in the IDE. If it is only for necessary for a Gradle run, you can define the composite build via commandline argument.

I dread init scripts because I always forget to check them when something goes wrong

While drawback is, that then

git status

will not show that I currently use the dependency included instead of binary. 😕

I guess it's a good case of "whatever floats your boat"

I wrote https://github.com/ephemient/git-magic/blob/main/git-filter-local which uses git smudge/clean filters to invisibly maintain local diffs on top of projects

I've had a similar idea to @Vampire that I never actually tried which is to have a gitignored directory, and to symlink any included builds that I want, and in

settings.gradle.kts

I iterate those and add them as

includedBuild

I never replied and thanked you all - apologies. I finally got around to applying Vampire's solution via this script. To build against a local build:

shell
./include-build.sh <relative_path_to_build>

To stop building against all local builds:

shell
./include-build.sh -r

To stop building against specific local builds:

shell
./include-build.sh -r <relative_path_to_build>