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Compiling_the_SDK_for_Android.md

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This tutorial will guide through the few steps to compile the Minko SDK for Android using the command line. Compiling the SDK for Android should work on Windows, OS X, Linux.

To target Android, the Android SDK and NDK must be installed. Both are free and available on all supported platforms. However, on Windows, Cygwin is an additional requirement. Though you can follow Google's instructions regarding the installation of the toolchain, all necessary steps will be detailed here.

Step 1: Get the sources

Make sure you have the source code of Minko on your filesystem. You can get them from our repository: Installing the Minko SDK sources.

Step 2: Installing the Android environment

Installing a Unix environment (Windows only)

On Linux and OS X, you should be fine with your default environment. Please skip this step.

On Windows however, Cygwin 1.7+ must be installed. Cygwin is a Unix environment for Windows which is required to run the NDK. On other platforms, you should be fine with your default environment, so skip this part.

Once you have downloaded the installer, run it. Choose Install from Internet, click Next. You should be fine with all the default options. After you have selected a mirror and clicked Next, Cygwin will download and present to you the list of available packages.

By default, only the base packages are installed. We, however, need the development packages. Rather than picking the packages we think we need, and then struggling with missing dependencies and other typical Unix nightmares, I suggest that we install the entire Devel branch. Click (once) on the word Default next to the root Devel node and wait few seconds while the setup hangs.

When it is back, you will see that Default changes to Install for the Devel node. Install and wait. This may take a while.

Installing the Android SDK

  • Define the environment variable ANDROID_HOME pointing to the following directory:
    • Windows: C:\android
    • OS X / Linux: /opt/android
  • Download the latest ADT bundle (make sure to download ADT bundle only, not with Eclipse)
  • Extract the archive to the ${ANDROID_HOME} directory

Installing the Android NDK

  • Download the Android NDK (r10d) package
  • Extract the archive to ${ANDROID_HOME}/ndk
  • Run the following script: script/install_jni.sh

Installing Ant

  • Windows: decompress the Ant binary archive in the ${ANDROID_HOME}/ant directory and add ${ANDROID_HOME}/ant/bin to your Path environment variable.
  • OS X: use the brew package manager using the brew install ant command
  • Linux: apt-get install ant

The final folder hierarchy should be as follow:

 ${ANDROID_HOME}/

 ant
 build-tools
 extras
 ndk/
   android-ndk-r${VERSION}
 platforms
 platform-tools
 toolchains
 tools

Note: the ${ANDROID_HOME}/ant directory should exist only on Windows.

Step 3: Generating the JNI solution

Minko's SDK uses premake5, which is embed in the SDK, for its build system. The Native Development Kit for Android uses Makefiles, so we can use the default Cygwin GNU make.

To do this, open a command line prompt in the root directory of the SDK and run:

script/solution_gmake_*.sh

Note: * can be min to compile only the Minko SDK or full to compile SDK and all examples and tutorials.

Step 4: Generate a keystore for release builds

If you don't have any keystore yet, you can generate it using this command line:

$ keytool -genkey -v -keystore my-release-key.keystore -alias [ALIAS NAME] -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

(make sure to replace [ALIAS NAME] by your alias name)

If you follow the instructions, you should have a generated .keystore file.

Then, you have to define 3 new environment variables:

  • ANDROID_KEYSTORE_ALIAS: the alias used to generate the .keystore file.
  • ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD: the password used to generate the .keystore file.
  • ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PATH: the path to you .keystore file (including the .keystore filename)

Last step for build in release for Android is to make sure that you have a binary called zipalign in your ${ANDROID}/tools directory. If not, take it from ${ANDROID}/build-tools/[LAST API VERSION].

For further information, please follow the official Android documentation.

Step 6: Compile the SDK

Now, you should have a bunch of Makefiles. You can build the solution using the following command line:

$ make config=android_release

If you want to leverage multicore processors, you can use the following command line (replace '4' by your actual number of cores):

$ make -j4 config=android_release

It should speed up the compilation process significantly.

Step 7 (optional): Re-compile SDL2

If you get undefined reference errors for SDL2 functions at linkage when building the SDK's examples/tutorials, it means you might have to rebuild SDL2 for your NDK/platform. By default, Minko builds for ARMv7. If you need to support another architecture, you will have to rebuild SDL2.

To do this, regenerate the solution with the --rebuild-sdl option:

script/premake5.sh gmake --rebuild-sdl

Then try the step 4 again. Your solution should contain a new SDL2 project that will be built using your version of the Android NDK and you should not get any linkage error.

Step 8: Enjoy!

Now use your SDK to Create a new application.