Android Command line tools only

coding · September 3, 2021, 12:27pm

Hi there.

I’d like to avoid Android Studio (size, bloated, etc), and it’s possible to build Android projects just with the command line (actually its all we use on every platform).

I remember in 2015 with ant scripts this was feasible. Wondering if anyone has tests, pointers, directions, offroad charts… Something like what @kkirbatski suggests was possible in earlier versions of of-android, circa 14, 15:

Linux android command-line build (ant? make?)

I too was wondering how to do this. I ended up having to do a few things to get this to work.

There is a file called paths.make located here:
/of_v0.9.0_android_release/libs/openFrameworksCompiled/project/android/paths.make
Update the line where is says NDK_ROOT= to point to your NDK root. Pretty self explanatory.

Then, you’ll need to run make with a PLATFORM_OS variable of Android:
make PLATFORM_OS=Android
This will compile the c/c++ code to a shared object file and will also create a jni folder with Android.mk and Application.mk.

After that, I actually had to move the src folder to a temporary location and rename srcJava to src. I thought I could pass in a variable to ant to change where the java sources were found, but due to library dependencies this ended up not working, which resulted in me just renaming the folder.

Now you’ll need to run android update project -p . so your sdk.dir is passed in properly. You’ll also have to do this for any project dependencies. In my case I also had to run it in /of_v0.9.0_android_release/addons/ofxAndr

This message is a bump of How to command-line build of_v0.10.1_android_release and Linux android command-line build (ant? make?) - #2 by nunos, mods please excuse if this is considered littering.

Thank you.

&c

kkirbatski · September 5, 2021, 5:10pm

If you use the project generator, you should just be able to run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it’ll compile and package your project.

coding · October 8, 2021, 8:54am

Thanks. I have figured that part out. But it still doesn’t work. Neither does latest Android studio, or even from an old 3.1.2 Android studio setup I had where it all worked.

The gradle script is impressive and all functionality is already there. ./gradlew tasks

Build tasks
-----------
androidArm64Debug - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:arm64Debug'.
androidArm64Release - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:arm64Release'.
androidArm7Debug - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:arm7Debug'.
androidArm7Release - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:arm7Release'.
androidDebug - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:debug'.
androidRelease - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:release'.
androidX86Debug - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:x86Debug'.
androidX86Release - Assembles AndroidBinary 'android:x86Release'.
assemble - Assembles all variants of all applications and secondary packages.
assembleAndroidTest - Assembles all the Test applications.
assembleArm64 - Assembles all Arm64 builds.
assembleArm64Debug - Assembles all arm64Debug builds.
assembleArm64Release - Assembles all arm64Release builds.
assembleArm7 - Assembles all Arm7 builds.
assembleArm7Debug - Assembles all arm7Debug builds.
assembleArm7Release - Assembles all arm7Release builds.
assembleDebug - Assembles all Debug builds.
assembleRelease - Assembles all Release builds.
assembleX86 - Assembles all X86 builds.
assembleX86Debug - Assembles all x86Debug builds.
assembleX86Release - Assembles all x86Release builds.
build - Assembles and tests this project.
buildDependents - Assembles and tests this project and all projects that depend on it.
buildNeeded - Assembles and tests this project and all projects it depends on.
clean - Deletes the build directory.
cleanBuildCache - Deletes the build cache directory.
compileArm64DebugAndroidTestSources
compileArm64DebugSources
compileArm64DebugUnitTestSources
compileArm64ReleaseSources
compileArm64ReleaseUnitTestSources
compileArm7DebugAndroidTestSources
compileArm7DebugSources
compileArm7DebugUnitTestSources
compileArm7ReleaseSources
compileArm7ReleaseUnitTestSources
compileDebugAndroidTestSources
compileDebugSources
compileDebugUnitTestSources
compileReleaseSources
compileReleaseUnitTestSources
compileX86DebugAndroidTestSources
compileX86DebugSources
compileX86DebugUnitTestSources
compileX86ReleaseSources
compileX86ReleaseUnitTestSources
extractDebugAnnotations - Extracts Android annotations for the debug variant into the archive file
extractReleaseAnnotations - Extracts Android annotations for the release variant into the archive file
mockableAndroidJar - Creates a version of android.jar that's suitable for unit tests.

But it fails on my systems, my older machine with a working setup broke, and now from manjaro, I always end up with errors on the making part of the project.

./gradlew task androidX86Debug

…

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':openFrameworksProject:compileOpenFrameworksLibX86DebugX86StaticLibraryOpenFrameworksLibX86DebugX86StaticLibraryMainCpp'.
> No tool chain is available to build for platform 'x86':
    - Tool chain 'ndk-clang' (Clang): Could not determine Clang version: failed to execute clang -dM -E -.

* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.

BUILD FAILED

Total time: 2.87 secs

The toolchains are in the NDK 15rc folder, but somehow the system is not finding them.
ls ./ndk-bundle/toolchains/
aarch64-linux-android-4.9 mips64el-linux-android-4.9 x86-4.9
arm-linux-androideabi-4.9 mipsel-linux-android-4.9 x86_64-4.9
llvm renderscript

I’ve already seen this is the kind of error reported here Android Development on Linux 20.04?

Unfortunately I don’t have a mac to workaround the situation,

Any help in getting OF-Android compilation going on linux is really helpful.