Save programmer's SSD

Recently, building project, I thought, how many file i/o operations happen during build process, and how terribly it reduces my SSD lifetime by consuming a limited number of write cycles. Immediately appeared a natural wish to link a build system's temporary files directory somewere in tmpfs. At first I wanted to write a shell script, but soon understood that it's a wrong way and decided to include according instructions in build project. As I wanted to make this easily reusable, a small SaveSSD plugin for Gradle was born. Source code is published at Github, and the compiled library can be included in project by referencing my maven repository at Bintray. Plugin was tested in Android Studio and Intellij IDEA with Android and Java projects, but it should work with any Gradle project on all *nix systems (on Windows it just does nothing). By the way, as RAM access is much faster, than HDD access, HDD owners also can gain profit from SaveSSD plugin usage - build process becomes faster. Nevertheless, there is an option to turn it on and off for every team member individually.

To use SaveSSD plugin in your project, you should:

1. Reference SaveSSD plugin in your gradle.build (this sample references the newest plugin version in my repository)

   buildscript {
       repositories {
           maven {
               url 'http://dl.bintray.com/haunted-soft/maven'
           }
       }
       dependencies {
           classpath 'com.haunted.gradle-plugins:save-ssd:+@jar'
       }
   }
   apply plugin:'save-ssd'
   

2. Tell that you wish to activate plugin on current machine in gradle.properties (typically, this file contains individual developer's preferences and excluded from version control system)

   saveSSD = true
   

3. Perform clean task or delete /build directory manually, than perform build (or other tasks) in your project as usual.

   gradle clean
   gradle build
   

   You also can run saveSsd task manually - it will run ignoring saveSSD=true check but it will do nothing while /build directory exists and not empty.

I wish you happy programming and a long life to your drives!

From: Urals Highlander: Save programmer's SSD