GRIP (Gradle Replace In-Place)

A gradle tool to update some values in your (documentation) files by running a task.

(inspired by Knit)

Directives

Insert a gradle properties: GRADLE_PROPERTIES

<!--$ GRADLE_PROPERTIES version --><!-- END $-->

Take 1 parameter that must be the name of the gradle properties on your project.

Insert a system environment variable: SYSTEM_ENV

<!--$ SYSTEM_ENV LOGNAME --><!-- END $-->

Take 1 parameter that must be the name of one of the environment variable on the computer running grip.

Insert a local file

<!--$ INSERT src/commonMain/kotlin/com/glureau/grip/sample/doc.md --><!-- END $-->

Take 1 parameter that uses the gradle file pattern.

For example, the previous INSERT could be extended to:

<!--$ INSERT src/**/sample/*.md --><!-- END $-->

Insert a date/time: DATETIME

<!--$ DATETIME yyyy.MM.dd G 'at' HH:mm:ss z --><!-- END $-->

Take 1 parameter that represents the formatting of the current time (Calendar.getInstance()).

Setup

plugins {
    id("com.glureau.grip") version "0.4.0"
}

Then you can add additional configuration, with:

grip {
    // When replaceInPlace is false, the files are processed and the resulting file is stored in build/grip, see [Advanced](#Advanced)
    replaceInPlace = false

    // Choose the files that grip should process
    files = fileTree(project.projectDir) {
        // By default, we pick only markdowns, but there is really no limitation on type file.
        include("**/**.md")
        // Avoid re-loading the generated files
        exclude("**/grip/**")
    }
}

To update the files: $ ./gradlew grip

File types support

Currently the replacement token is made for Markdown and tools like mkdocs or dokka as it's considering a web comment format.

If you want to use the same plugin on other type of files, please open an issue with your needs!

Advanced

With GRIP you can replace in place but you can also generates files in the build/grip directory. (Only one mode available at a time.)

This allow to not modify your repository while using the new file copy. Also the produced file doesn't contain the original directives.

Execution order

Files retrieved by the grip.files extension are sorted so that the longer path are parsed first. For example src/com/glureau/grip/README.md (4 parent levels) is parsed before src/README.md (only 1 parent). This combined with replaceInPlace = false allow a multiple passes approach.

Let's say you want to have a global documentation that contains multiple parts, each part in a different module. And that those parts can also be splitted in more fine-grained documentation, with also directives in it:

• moduleA/doc.md // General documentation about module B
• moduleB/doc.md // General documentation about module B
• moduleB/featureX/doc.md // Documentation about feature X inside the module B
• moduleB/featureY/doc.md // Documentation about feature Y inside the module B
• doc.md // Global documentation In moduleB/doc.md you can decide to load the documentation from every features of the module B. And from doc.md you can decide to load documentation from module A and from module B. In this approach, the produced file for doc.md will contain the content of all other markdowns.

Once this setup is in place, ./gradlew grip will generate a file in build/grip/doc.md (among other files) that you can directly use to publish somewhere else.