android – Obvious Thoughts About IT

Phonegap: You may not have the required environment or OS to build this project

BUILD FAILED
Total time: 5.352 secs

/var/www/bt/platforms/android/cordova/node_modules/q/q.js:126

throw e;

^
Error code 1 for command: /var/www/bt/platforms/android/gradlew with args: cdvBuildRelease,-b,/var/www/bt/platforms/android/build.gradle,-Dorg.gradle.daemon=true

ERROR building one of the platforms: Error: /var/www/bt/platforms/android/cordova/build: Command failed with exit code 8
You may not have the required environment or OS to build this project

Answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/30761663/613702

Finalizing my first application in the Google Play Market

Not too technical, but still… For a long time I was playing with some Android development, but it was always just for fun and never left the local computer or my own phone.

Now I’ve finally finished a tiny silly but cute app and started uploading it to the Play Store. What can I say – it’s like a new love to programming. Coding starts matter, you again care about all tiny details your app has. You have to groom it before showing to public and you feel it’s your child.

So definitely, if you’re tired of programming – try making some software for people.

To be continued…

Install Phonegap on Windows

Required tools

1. PhoneGap Desktop application.

This will let you easily transfer the application to the mobile device without necessity to compile the application on host computer and transfer the .apk file (in case of Android device).

Install the PhoneGap Desktop application as described here. Download the installer and run it.

2. PhoneGap CLI

If your goal is simple Javascript applications, you can stop after the previous step. But I’m going to use plugins, so I’ll need a command line tool.

Prerequisite is node.js. Download it and install. I will use the latest version, but LTS is always safer. Note, that on different versions of Windows node.js behaves differently. On Windows8 I recall I got a separate console for Node.js. On Windows7 it can be run from a normal Windows console (type cmd in the command search).

Now from console run the following command:

npm install -g phonegap@latest

From now on we can use phonegap command from the command line.

3. Android SDK manager

On windows this comes as a part of Android Studio, though it’s possible to install it separately: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/index.html

I will download Android Studio: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html and call SDK Manager from the toolbar.

Optional tools

I store my code on Github, so I’ll need Git.

Git

Download the installer here and run it.

When the installer asks about the PATH modification, I prefer to choose the option to allow git to run from command line (third option on the picture below):
Git installer

Building a PhoneGap project with plugins in Ubuntu

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, today I’m working on the proof of concept (PoC) of a mobile application that has to work with Bluetooth.

For this purpose I’ve chosen a PhoneGap framework which lets us build mobile application for all mobile platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Phone and some others). Strong side of PhoneGap is plugins – modules of native code for all mobile platforms which can be accessed from PhoneGap Javascript.

Normally for a simple project I’d choose Adobe Build to build the project for me. It can automatically build packages for all mobile platforms for you and even do more like publishing your project in corresponding app markets.

Unfortunately, I had issues building the project using Adobe Builder – it seems not to include plugins to the project. As right now I need only a package for Android, I decided not to strugle with Adobe and to build the .apk locally. For that go to the project directory and run the following:

$ phonegap build android

Build starting… and failing:

[phonegap] executing 'cordova platform add --save android'...
[phonegap] completed 'cordova platform add --save android'
[phonegap] executing 'cordova build android'...
Running command: /var/www/phonegap-bluetooth-poc/platforms/android/cordova/build

[Error: Failed to find 'ANDROID_HOME' environment variable. Try setting setting it manually.
Failed to find 'android' command in your 'PATH'. Try update your 'PATH' to include path to valid SDK directory.]

ERROR building one of the platforms: Error: /var/www/phonegap-bluetooth-poc/platforms/android/cordova/build: Command failed with exit code 2
You may not have the required environment or OS to build this project

So, failed to find ‘android’ command in your ‘PATH’. To fix that we need an Android SDK; we’ll get it from Android website.

After installing Android SDK, let’s update environment variables. Add the following lines to the end of ~/.bashrc file (replace /home/minras/Android/Sdk/ with your path):

export ANDROID_HOME=/home/minras/Android/Sdk/
export PATH=${PATH}:$ANDROID_HOME/tools:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools

And finally run source ~/.bashrc to initialize those variables.

Now the build should succeed:

$ phonegap build android

Android development, VirtualBox and KVM

Few times already in the past couple years I tried doing some development for Android, but most of the time I decided to postpone that for another piece of undefined time.

The reason was that I always had issues with setting up the virtual device for debugging. And without debugging there is no development.

So, what was the problem? I always used a VirtualBox machine for development, having Windows as host and Ubuntu as guest. But to run AVD (Android Virtual Device), Linux uses KVM infrastructure; and according to StackOverflow, KVM can’t be run together with VirtualBox.

Although, KVM can be emulated, but then AVD is extremely slow (which I observed on the previous computer).

Solution? I pulled from the shelf one of my old Android phones (not to kill the tablet accidentally) and configured it to be a debugging device instead of AVD. Bingo 🙂