I’m setting up some projects in gradle 8.4 and trying to create a good versioning system for those projects, my first instinct was to set the variables for minor/major/patch etc. in gradle.properties file, like the old days. Apparently I’m not setting up properly anymore or things have changed.

My gradle.properties file (the numbers are examples):

#Production
VERSION_CODE_PROD= 101
versionCodeProd = 101

VERSION_MAJOR_PROD=1
VERSION_MINOR_PROD=0
VERSION_PATCH_PROD=1

#Staging
VERSION_CODE_STAGING=101

VERSION_MAJOR_STAGING=1
VERSION_MINOR_STAGING=0
VERSION_PATCH_STAGING=1

Naturally i tried accessing these variables in the project’s build.gradle file to no success:
project’s build.gradle ext:

ext {
 //prod
     versionName = VERSION_MAJOR_PROD + '.' + VERSION_MINOR_PROD + '.' + VERSION_PATCH_PROD
     versionCode = VERSION_CODE_PROD

 //staging
     versionNameStag = VERSION_MAJOR_PROD_ALT + '.' + VERSION_MINOR_PROD_ALT + '.' +      VERSION_PATCH_PROD_ALT
     versionCodeStag = VERSION_CODE_PROD_ALT
}

The code above states that all those references to gradle.properties are unresolved, even a simple variable declaration (foo = bar) cannot be resolved (and I can’t access these variables on module:app build.gradle)

Formerly i would access these variables in module:app build.gradle like so:

productFlavors {
    production {
            versionCode rootProject.ext.versionCode
            versionName rootProject.ext.versionName
        }

    staging {
            versionCode rootProject.ext.versionNameStag 
            versionName rootProject.ext.versionCodeStag 
        }
    }

Tried serching the gradle 8 docs to see changes, and now I know I should be using kotlin DSL for these configs, my question is, how to translate the former implementation i had (which some older applications still use) to a similar implementation on kotlin DSL?

While searching the doc Kotlin DSL and Configuring the Build Environment
I came across the extra delegation, and tried to implement this in the project’s build.gradle:

ext {
 val versionCodeProd : Int by extra(1)
}

But can’t access it using versionCode = project.extra["versionCodeProd"]
anywhere else (obviously I synchronized the project after declaring it)