Dexcount Gradle Plugin

A Gradle plugin to report the number of method references in your APK on every build.

This helps you keep tabs on the growth of your app, with an eye to staying under the 65,536 method-reference limit, and avoiding the headache of eliminating methods or enabling multidex.

Usage:

in app/build.gradle

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral() // or jCenter()
    }

    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.getkeepsafe.dexcount:dexcount-gradle-plugin:0.2.1'
    }
}

apply plugin: 'com.getkeepsafe.dexcount'

Sample output:

> ./gradlew assembleDebug

...buildspam...
:app:compileDebugSources
:app:preDexDebug UP-TO-DATE
:app:dexDebug
:app:packageDebug
:app:zipalignDebug
:app:assembleDebug
Total methods in MyApp-debug-5.3.14.apk: 56538

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 33.017 secs

Detailed method counts

By default, a breakdown of method references by package and class will be written to a file under ${buildDir}/outputs/dexcount/${variant}.

For example, an excerpt from our own app (in app/build/outputs/dexcount/debug.txt):

methods  package/class name
6        android.speech
6        android.speech.tts
5        android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech
1        android.speech.tts.UtteranceProgressListener
10789    android.support
20       android.support.annotation
1        android.support.annotation.CheckResult
4        android.support.annotation.FloatRange
2        android.support.annotation.IntDef
2        android.support.annotation.IntRange
6        android.support.annotation.RequiresPermission
1        android.support.annotation.RequiresPermission.Read
1        android.support.annotation.RequiresPermission.Write
4        android.support.annotation.Size
1        android.support.annotation.StringDef
7010     android.support.v4
1        android.support.v4.BuildConfig
41       android.support.v4.accessibilityservice

Configuration

Dexcount is configurable via a Gradle extension (shown with default values):

in app/build.gradle:

dexcount {
    includeClasses = false
    includeFieldCount = false
    printAsTree = false
    orderByMethodCount = false
    verbose = false
}

Each flag controls some aspect of the printed output:

includeClasses: When true, individual classes will be include in the pacage list - otherwise, only packages are included.
includeFieldCount: When true, the number of fields in a package or class will be included in the printed output.
printAsTree: When true, the output file will be formatted as a package tree, with nested packages indented, instead of the default list format.
orderByMethodCount: When true, packages will be sorted in descending order by the number of methods they contain.
verbose: When true, the output file will also be printed to the build's standard output.

Snapshot Builds

We host snapshots in the Sonatype OSS repo. They are updated on each commit. As snapshots, they are inherently unstable - use at your own risk! To use them, add the Sonatype Snapshot repo to your repositories:

buildscript {
  repositories {
    // other repos should come first
    maven { url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots' }
  }
  
  dependencies {
    classpath 'com.getkeepsafe.dexcount:dexcount-gradle-plugin:0.2.2-SNAPSHOT'
  }
}

Building

./gradlew build

Pushing artifacts to Sonatype requires membership in the KeepSafe Sonatype org, which is by employment only. Once you have a login, put it in your private global Gradle file (e.g. ~/.gradle/gradle.properties, along with a valid GPG signing configuration.

Minutia

This plugin creates a task per output file, per variant, and configures each task to run after that variant's assemble task. This means that if the assemble task does not run, no method count will be reported.

Credits

The Java code from the com.android.dexdeps package is sourced from the Android source tree. Inspired by Mihail Parparita's dex-method-counts project, to whom much credit is due.

tyl210110 / dexcount-gradle-plugin