It's that time again when the fresh version of Android Studio hits the Canary channel, and of course, you're eager to try it. As soon as you open your project in the new Android Studio, it will nicely ask you to update the Android Gradle plugin version to match the IDE version. Depending on how adventurous your team is, alpha or beta plugin versions may or may not be OK. Sometimes your colleagues will complain that a preview version of the Android Gradle plugin breaks their build. So how can you try an early preview on your development machine without accidentally pushing your changes to the shared repo, and without the need to edit the build.gradle before every push? There's a pretty easy way to achieve this.

First of all, open the gradle.properties file in the root directory of your project (create the file if it doesn't exist yet). Add the following line:

gradlePluginVersion=2.3.0

Now navigate to the build.gradle file in the root folder of your project and replace this:

buildscript { dependencies { classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.3.0' } }

with this:

buildscript { dependencies { classpath "com.android.tools.build:gradle:$gradlePluginVersion" } }

Build the project to check that this works - it should. You can safely push the changes to the repo. This change itself doesn't add or remove anything from the project, but it introduces an indirection that you can leverage to substitute the value with a local one. Now, open the gradle.properties file that's located inside the .gradle folder in the Home directory of your computer (on Mac that's /Users/you/.gradle/gradle.properties ), and add the following line:

gradlePluginVersion=2.4.0-alpha1

Get back to Android Studio and build again, you'll notice that the newer version of the plugin got picked up. How does this work?

There's a number of ways to parameterize a Gradle build:

Specifying parameters in the project's gradle.properties

Specifying parameters in computer's gradle.properties

Passing parameters from the command line

The latter is also a working solution, here's how the build command would look:

./gradlew -PgradlePluginVersion=2.4.0-alpha1 assemble