Exclude assets for release build type

Question

I'm importing an android library in an application built with gradle, like that:

dependencies {
    compile 'com.example:great-lib:0.1-SNAPSHOT'
}

This library contains only assets, js, css and images to be used in a webview, with a layout like that:

assets/
|-> great.css
|-> great.min.js
|-> great.min.js.map
|-> js/
|   |-> plop.js
|   |-> foo.js
|   ...
|-> img/
|   ...

The js folder contains source files (to be used with source maps). I would like to include it and the .map file for the debug builds, and have only the minified js in release builds, but I can't find a way to do that.

So far I've tried : 

android {
    // this doesn't exclude anything
    packageOptions {
        exclude 'assets/js'
    }
    buildTypes {
        release {
            // this does exclude the js folder, but in both release and debug
            aaptOptions {
                ignoreAssetsPattern "!js"
            }
        }
    }
}

Any idea if what I want is possible to achieve, and if so how?

(I've also thought of publishing two versions of the library (great-lib and great-lib-debug), and have the dependency in debugCompile and releaseCompile, but I'd prefer avoiding that and publishing a single version)

Answer 1

I ended up doing the following:

android.applicationVariants.all { variant ->

  if (variant.name.contains('Release')) {
    // exclude source and sourcemap from release builds
    def noJsSourceTask = task("delete${variant.name}JsSource", type: Delete) {
      delete "${buildDir}/intermediates/assets/${variant.dirName}/js"
      delete "${buildDir}/intermediates/assets/${variant.dirName}/great.min.js.map"
    }
    variant.mergeAssets.finalizedBy noCeJsSourceTask
  }
}

It works ok, but there are a few things I don't really like:

• I'm touching at the files produced by a task after it is done (the finalizedBy), so it doesn't work well with "up-to-date" checking. But it's only for release builds, I'm doing debug ones more often
• the path of the files to delete is manually built. I'm not sure if it's generic enough to be reused in other projects as-is
• I'm selecting the variants based on their name. I would have liked something more structured.