Otaku – Cedric's blog

When I started thinking about how profiles should work in Kobalt, I realized that the simplest approach I’d like to see in a build tool is defining a boolean variable and having if statements in my build file. So that’s exactly how Kobalt’s profiles are implemented.

You start by defining boolean values initialized to false in your build file:

  val experimental = false
  val premium = false

Then you use this variable wherever you need it in your build file:

  val p = javaProject {
      name = if (experimental) "project-exp" else "project"
      version = "1.3"
      ...

Finally, you invoke ./kobaltw with the --profiles parameter followed by the profiles you want to activate, separated by a comma:

  ./kobaltw -profiles experimental,premium assemble

Keep in mind that since your build file is a real Kotlin source file,
you can use these profile variables pretty much anywhere, e.g.:

dependencies {
    if (experimental)
        "com.squareup.okhttp:okhttp:2.4.0"
    else
        "com.squareup.okhttp:okhttp:2.5.0",

And that’s it.

The full series of articles on Kobalt can be found here.