Can Circle CI reference gradle.properties credentials?

Question

I am setting up a Circle CI build for an Android project, and am wondering how to add a gradle.properties file to my project build. I use a local gradle.properties to store my API keys and sensitive data. Other CI tools (ie, Jenkins) allow you to upload a gradle.properties file to use across all builds, but I am not able to find a way to do this in Circle CI.

It seems that environment variables are the only way Circle CI allows you to add secret credentials to your project.

Is there a way to use credentials from gradle.properties on Circle CI builds?

Answer 1

Add all properties in the gradle.properties to CircleCI "Environment Variables", but prepend them with:

ORG_GRADLE_PROJECT_

Answer 2

Depending on your environment(s), you could also use base64 to encode/decode gradle.properties. This worked for me on my macOS CircleCI environment:

• From my local macOS computer, I encoded my multi-line gradle.properties file using:

  base64 < gradle.properties > encoded-gradle.properties

• I copied the value in encoded-gradle.properties and placed it in a CircleCI environment variable (in this case, named the variable: GRADLE_PROPERTIES_DATA)

In my CircleCI config.yaml file, before building, created the gradle.properties file and decoded the encoded value and placed it in gradle.properties, using the following:

echo $GRADLE_PROPERTIES_DATA | base64 --decode > gradle.properties