How to prevent rawproto file generation or delete them automatically?

Question

Android gradle plugin generates tons of .rawproto files in build/android-profile directory. What are they used for? Is there a way to disable this madness or automatically delete them?

Answer 1

I've been bugged by it for a long time, and now that I noticed there's gigabytes of this hogging my smallish SSD, I've decided to figure out a way to disable it. For me the most annoying thing before occupying too much space was gradlew clean leaving a build folder behind.

Only tested with com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.0.1, so YMMV.

TL;DR

For global application read last section, per-project use this in rootProject's build.gradle:

com.android.build.gradle.internal.profile.ProfilerInitializer.recordingBuildListener =
        new com.android.build.gradle.internal.profile.RecordingBuildListener(
            com.android.builder.profile.ProcessProfileWriter.get());
// and then `gradlew --stop && gradlew clean` to verify no build folder is left behind

Investigation

Thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/a/43910084/253468 linked by @JeffRichards mentioning ProcessProfileWriterFactory.java, I've put a breakpoint there and checked who's calling it by running gradlew -Dorg.gradle.debug=true --info (not to be confused with --debug) and attaching a remote debugger.

I followed the trail and found that ProcessProfileWriter.finishAndMaybeWrite creates the folder and writes. Backtracing on method calls I found that ProfilerInitializer.recordingBuildListener controls whether it's called ... and that is initialized directly by BasePlugin (apply plugin: 'com.android.*').

So in order to prevent anything from happening I opted to try to disable the guard, by pre-initialized that static field. Thankfully Groovy (and hence Gradle) doesn't give a * about JVM visibility modifiers, so without reflection here's the magic line:

com.android.build.gradle.internal.profile.ProfilerInitializer.recordingBuildListener =
    new com.android.build.gradle.internal.profile.RecordingBuildListener(
        com.android.builder.profile.ProcessProfileWriter.get());

I know, it's a bit verbose, but it works, and if you import stuff it looks better:

ProfilerInitializer.recordingBuildListener = new RecordingBuildListener(ProcessProfileWriter.get());

Applying the magic

In a single-project build (one build.gradle) you must apply this before

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

In multi-project builds (most template projects: app folder, settings.gradle, and many build.gradles) I suggest you apply it around the buildscript block:

buildscript {
    // ...
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.0.1'
    }
}
// magic line here

Make sure it's before any apply plugin:s, and not inside a buildscript block.

Applying the magic globally

Obviously if it bothers us in one project, it will in all cases, so following Gradle's manual, create a file in ~/.gradle/init.gradle or %USERPROFILE%\.gradle\init.gradle (mind you this folder can be relocated with GRADLE_USER_HOME) with the following contents:

// NB: any changes to this script require a new daemon (`gradlew --stop` or `gradlew --no-daemon <tasks>`)
rootProject { rootProject -> // see https://stackoverflow.com/a/48087543/253468
    // listen for lifecycle events on the project's plugins
    rootProject.plugins.whenPluginAdded { plugin ->
        // check if any Android plugin is being applied (not necessarily just 'com.android.application')
        // this plugin is actually exactly for this purpose: to get notified
        if (plugin.class.name == 'com.android.build.gradle.api.AndroidBasePlugin') {
            logger.info 'Turning off `build/android-profile/profile-*.(rawproto|json)` generation.'
            // execute the hack in the context of the buildscript, not in this initscript
            new GroovyShell(plugin.class.classLoader).evaluate("""
                com.android.build.gradle.internal.profile.ProfilerInitializer.recordingBuildListener =
                    new com.android.build.gradle.internal.profile.RecordingBuildListener(
                        com.android.builder.profile.ProcessProfileWriter.get());
            """)
        }
    }
}