Build Android apps from termux?

[joakim-noah]

Wow, blown away, 405 packages available on Android. :)

Do you have any plans to package the necessary tools from the NDK and SDK so that I could write and build an Android apk directly from my tablet? I notice you have aapt packaged, which is used by the SDK to package apks. The compilers and linkers from the NDK wouldn't be hard, as it's all open source and you already build the stock versions yourself. I don't know how bad it would be to extract and build the necessary tools from the SDK. If that is your plan, that'd be great.

Some small bugs I've noticed so far:

• clang couldn't link a "hello world" test because it was passing -lgcc to the linker, twice actually. If I compiled to an object file with clang and then ran the same linker command without that flag, it worked.
• git log shows some cruft, specifically every commit starts like this:

[[33mcommit a254fecc4824a884024e7907e2185cfc95e4c64d[[m

• gdb says it can't load 4-5 shared libraries when running any program. I tried it on a program that I know hangs on Android 5.0, but I couldn't Ctrl-C out of the program to get a backtrace in gdb. I ended up having to open another session and kill gdb.

Love this work; if you have a bitcoin address, I suggest you make it public.

[fornwall]

Do you have any plans to package the necessary tools from the NDK and SDK so that I could write and build an Android apk directly from my tablet?

Yes, that would be great, will look at it more soon! The parts from NDK are already available, what's really missing is gradle support. Or perhaps lightweight build commands for building simple APK:s in Termux as an initial step.

clang couldn't link a "hello world" test because it was passing -lgcc to the linker, twice actually.

Are you using an x86 device? Those packages are not as tested or used as arm packages are (where e.g. clang does not have this problem), but just report problems such as this and I will look into it!

git log shows some cruft, specifically every commit starts like this

This was due to the busybox version of less not supporting required escape sequences used by git log. I've added the full less package as a dependency to git now, so if you run apt update && apt upgrade you should get less installed and a working git log command.

gdb says it can't load 4-5 shared libraries when running any program

Can you paste the exact message? I guess this is on a x86 device?

[joakim-noah]

Yes, that would be great, will look at it more soon! The parts from NDK are already available, what's really missing is gradle support. Or perhaps lightweight build commands for building simple APK:s in Termux as an initial step.

Yes, something light without gradle is exactly what I'm looking for. I found this site that explains exactly what the Ant build scripts are doing, I'm reading it now. It should be possible to replace Ant/Gradle with make or your build command of choice and call all the necessary packaging tools, especially since you're already making available packaging utilities like aapt.

As for the NDK compilers and other tools, those are patched a little for Android, whereas you are providing mostly stock versions. For example, these are all the changes they made to clang 3.6 from the NDK (every commit after "Merging r232389: by Joerg Sonnenberger"), less changes are similarly made to llvm (you can ignore all commits labeled [pndk], that's for some other tool). I don't know how much of a difference those changes will make, as I haven't examined them in detail, but they might matter.

Are you using an x86 device? Those packages are not as tested or used as arm packages are (where e.g. clang does not have this problem), but just report problems such as this and I will look into it!

No, stock Android 5.1.1 on ARM. I looked into this further and the issue appears to be that libgcc is shipped with your gcc package, which I didn't have installed. I see that the NDK clang also passes that flag: maybe it would be a good idea to provide libgcc and/or llvm's compiler-rt as separate packages for clang to use? After installing gcc, clang works fine.

This was due to the busybox version of less not supporting required escape sequences used by git log. I've added the full less package as a dependency to git now, so if you run apt update && apt upgrade you should get less installed and a working git log command.

Thanks, that fixed it.

Can you paste the exact message? I guess this is on a x86 device?

ARM device, I got this output both when running gdb with a "hello world" test program and a larger binary I had built before:

setpgrp failed in child: No such process
warning: Could not load shared library symbols for libc.so.
Do you need "set solib-search-path" or "set sysroot"?
warning: Could not load shared library symbols for libm.so.
Do you need "set solib-search-path" or "set sysroot"?
warning: Could not load shared library symbols for libstdc++.so.
Do you need "set solib-search-path" or "set sysroot"?
warning: Could not load shared library symbols for libnetd_client.so.
Do you need "set solib-search-path" or "set sysroot"?

[fornwall]

Thanks for the information! Will look into the issues in the coming weeks!

[joakim-noah]

I'll spin off clang and gdb into their own issues, so that this issue is just about whether and how much the NDK/SDK tools will be made available to build Android apks natively on Android.

[joakim-noah]

Hmm, I see that you make available the new jack compiler, which apparently is now the default java bytecode/dex compiler when building Android 6.0, though not sure if it's become the default compiler in the latest app SDK too. Looks like you have most of the tools in place, just need to add the remaining pieces to sign and align apks and someone could write build scripts to do this.

[joakim-noah]

I'm experimenting with this a bit now. I see that aapt cannot be used to build a package, because it requires an AndroidManifest.xml, but parsing that file requires an android.jar from the SDK. Specifically, going to the directory for an Android app and trying aapt package -M AndroidManifest.xml -S res produces a bunch of errors like this:

AndroidManifest.xml:3: error: No resource identifier found for attribute 'versionCode' in package 'android'

Any way you can provide an android.jar that can be used for this?

[fornwall]

The ecj package contains a $PREFIX/share/java/android.jar. It's a bit stripped down, does it work for aapt?

Otherwise you could try e.g. http://fornwall.net/android.jar which is the full android.jar from the android-21 platform in the SDK.

[joakim-noah]

Thanks for the jar files, tried them both. It turns out that both have an identical compressed AndroidManifest.xml but only the latter has a resources.arsc, which seems to be needed for aapt to parse a text AndroidManifest.xml for an app. If I extract the AndroidManifest.xml and resources.arsc from the SDK's android.jar and put just those two in a zip file (as that's all a jar file is), I'm able to use that instead of the full android.jar to package an apk.

So, it appears that all that is needed is the AndroidManifest.xml and resources.arsc from android.jar, at least for aapt to build a native apk without any java source. aapt also does some stuff with java files, which I have not tried as I'm only building purely native apks so far, so I don't know if the rest of android.jar is necessary for that.

[fornwall]

Great, perhaps an android.jar containing the resources.arsc should be split up into a separate package which e.g. aapt can depend on.

How do you specifiy the android.jar to use from aapt? Perhaps aapt can be patched to use the packaged android.jar by default.

[joakim-noah]

You pass any base packages to aapt using -I, which is shown here for the Mac, for example.

[joakim-noah]

I just experimented with building a simple sample app from the Android NDK, hello-jni, and it worked! You can now build an Android app, ie an apk, completely from the Termux command-line, at least a really simple one.

Here's what I did. First, I got the source for the NDK's sample apps:

git clone https://github.com/googlesamples/android-ndk.git

Then, I compiled the C and java source files for the hello-jni sample app, using the clang and jack packages in Termux:

cd android-ndk/hello-jni/app/src/main
clang -fpic -ffunction-sections -funwind-tables -fstack-protector-strong -Wno-invalid-command-line-argument -Wno-unused-command-line-argument -fno-integrated-as  -target armv5te-none-linux-androideabi -march=armv5te -mtune=xscale -msoft-float -mthumb -Os -g -DNDEBUG -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-strict-aliasing -O0 -UNDEBUG -marm -fno-omit-frame-pointer -Ijni -DANDROID  -Wa,--noexecstack -Wformat -Werror=format-security    -I/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/include -c  jni/hello-jni.c -o ./hello-jni.o
mkdir -p lib/armeabi
clang -Wl,-soname,libhello-jni.so -shared ./hello-jni.o -lgcc -target armv5te-none-linux-androideabi  -Wl,--no-undefined -Wl,-z,noexecstack -Wl,-z,relro -Wl,-z,now   -lc -lm -o lib/armeabi/libhello-jni.so
jack java/

The clang commands above were taken from running the ndk-build script from the NDK on linux in verbose mode (V=1) and then modifying them to remove references to the gcc toolchain, which must be hard-coded into your clang executables, and changing the include directory. I also had to remove the -no-canonical-prefixes flag, as it wouldn't follow the symbolic link to clang-3.7 if that was included.

I packaged up the apk using aapt and the android.jar from the SDK that you provided, from which only AndroidManifest.xml and resources.arsc were necessary:

aapt package -M AndroidManifest.xml -S res -I /sdcard/Download/android.jar -F hello-jni.apk
aapt add ./hello-jni.apk classes.dex lib/armeabi/libhello-jni.so

This unsigned apk could be used in an emulator, but I wanted to run the app on the same tablet on which I built it, so I signed it using the openssl package from Termux. I won't get into the full signing procedure, as other aspects are covered well elsewhere, but show that all necessary commands to sign an apk from scratch can be done from the Termux command-line.

I copied over a META-INF/ directory (where signing information for jar and apk files is stored) that I had lying around from another apk and modified its MANIFEST.MF and CERT.SF to list AndroidManifest.xml, classes.dex, lib/armeabi/libhello-jni.so, and resources.arsc. I then used openssl to get the sha1 digest for each of those files and the manifest, as shown here:

cd META-INF/
openssl sha1 -binary ../lib/armeabi/libhello-jni.so | openssl base64
openssl sha1 -binary MANIFEST.MF | openssl base64
grep -A2 lib/armeabi/libhello-jni.so MANIFEST.MF| openssl sha1 -binary| openssl base64

The first openssl command has to be done for every file listed in MANIFEST.MF and the resulting hash inserted, while the latter two produce hashes that are placed in CERT.SF. Finally, you sign the apk with your certificate and private key:

openssl smime -sign -md sha1 -binary -noattr -in CERT.SF -out CERT.RSA -outform der -inkey ../privatekey.pem -signer ../apk.certificate
cd ..
aapt add ./hello-jni.apk META-INF/*

Some info on generating a private key and certificate is here; I used the standard "Android Debug" owner/issuer info to create a debug certificate, as displayed in the second link above.

After allowing installation of apps from unknown sources in the security section of my tablet's Settings, I'm able to run the resulting apk, that contains both native and Java code and built completely from scratch on the Termux command-line.

Feel free to use the above info to put up a post or tutorial somewhere about what is possible with Termux, perhaps preceded with the full list of necessary Termux packages, as it might do well on reddit and other news sites and get you some publicity. No other mobile OS allows building apps directly on the mobile device itself, only Android with your Termux tools. It's a testament to the completely open-source toolchain google provides, the extreme openness and extensibility of Android, and your work repackaging all those tools to run on Android itself.

All that remains for this issue is to provide the two files mentioned above that aapt needs to parse an app's AndroidManifest.xml: you can close it once those are made available in some package.

[ashish0304]

How to zipalign?

[joakim-noah]

zipalign is a separate executable that has not been made available yet.

[Billzabob]

I'm having trouble building an android app with Termux. How do you install the Android SDK? When I run jack java/ it can't find any of the Android libraries. Is there a package for that?

[ashish0304]

You have to copy android.jar from your sdk.

…

On 25-Nov-2016 5:19 AM, "Billzabob" ***@***.***> wrote: I'm having trouble building an android app with Termux. How do you install the Android SDK? When I run jack java/ it can't find any of the Android libraries. Is there a package for that? — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#63 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AMotBuNP2swhURtv3qw4BlBx9AUZq3R9ks5rBiKagaJpZM4GpbQd> .

[Quasic]

Are you missing usr/share/jack/android.jack? I think that's the file mine uses, unless I change the classpath or something.

[Billzabob]

Thanks for the help. Both android.jar and android.jack work, although I guess neither include the support library. Interesting that jack doesn't use android.jack unless I tell it to use it.

[joakim-noah]

It should, all I have to run is jack --output-dex . src on a sample app from the NDK and it works. Maybe android.jack is not being added to your classpath properly?

[Billzabob]

Well it's working now. Not sure why it wasn't working before but at least it's fixed :) Thanks.

[Quasic]

I sometimes have weird issues if I forget to include one of the --output options.

[Billzabob]

Where does the Dex file go if you doesn't specify an output directory for jack?

[Quasic]

I've never found any files from it outside of the tmp directory. Without the output format specified, I think it simply test compiles. I see it using three subdirectories of tmp, which are deleted when it's done.

[TheDiamondYT1]

http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/android_m2repository_r47.zip

If it's outdated try increasing the number

[ghost]

I resorted to forking the termux-app repo, removing the code coverage lines from the CI config, and adding code to upload the build artifacts from CI to my dropbox. I don't think that quite counts as building Termux from a smartphone though. Has any progress been made?

[junaidahlone]

I want to build android apps in termux but i can't able to make them please tell me how can i use termux for building android apps...
I have installed all pkgs ;
Aapt
Ecj
Dx
Apksigner
Make
all pkgs.........
plz help me how can i build apps in termux...
Thnkyou....

[seisdr]

What about ndk-build and ant

[seisdr]

I don't know

[seisdr]

also apktool doesn't work
$ apktool build
I: Using Apktool 2.3.4
I: Checking whether sources has changed...
I: Checking whether resources has changed...
I: Building resources...
W: aapt: brut.common.BrutException: 32 bit OS detected. No 32 bit binaries available. (defaulting to $PATH binary)
W: ERROR: Unknown option '--forced-package-id'
W: Android Asset Packaging Tool
W:
W: Usage:
W: aapt l[ist] [-v] [-a] file.{zip,jar,apk}
W: List contents of Zip-compatible archive.
W:
W: aapt d[ump] [--values] [--include-meta-data] WHAT file.{apk} [asset [asset ...]]
W: strings Print the contents of the resource table string pool in the APK.
W: badging Print the label and icon for the app declared in APK.
W: permissions Print the permissions from the APK.
W: resources Print the resource table from the APK.
W: configurations Print the configurations in the APK.
W: xmltree Print the compiled xmls in the given assets.
W: xmlstrings Print the strings of the given compiled xml assets.
W:
W: aapt p[ackage] [-d][-f][-m][-u][-v][-x][-z][-M AndroidManifest.xml]
W: [-0 extension [-0 extension ...]] [-g tolerance] [-j jarfile]
W: [--debug-mode] [--min-sdk-version VAL] [--target-sdk-version VAL]
W: [--app-version VAL] [--app-version-name TEXT] [--custom-package VAL]
W: [--rename-manifest-package PACKAGE]
brut.androlib.AndrolibException: brut.common.BrutException: could not exec (exit code = 2): [aapt, p, --forced-package-id, 127, --min-sdk-version, 3, --target-sdk-version, 19, --version-code, 731, --version-name, 0.19, --no-version-vectors, -F, /data/data/com.termux/files/home/apktool/APKTOOL7930631272557971114.tmp, -0, arsc, -0, arsc, -I, /data/data/com.termux/files/home/apktool/1.apk, -S, /data/data/com.termux/files/home/apktool/in.celest.xash3d.hl/./res, -M, /data/data/com.termux/files/home/apktool/in.celest.xash3d.hl/./AndroidManifest.xml]
W: [--rename-instrumentation-target-package PACKAGE]
W: [--utf16] [--auto-add-overlay]
W: [--max-res-version VAL]
W: [-I base-package [-I base-package ...]]
W: [-A asset-source-dir] [-G class-list-file] [-P public-definitions-file]
W: [-D main-dex-class-list-file]
W: [-S resource-sources [-S resource-sources ...]]
W: [-F apk-file] [-J R-file-dir]
W: [--product product1,product2,...]
W: [-c CONFIGS] [--preferred-density DENSITY]
W: [--split CONFIGS [--split CONFIGS]]
W: [--feature-of package [--feature-after package]]
W: [raw-files-dir [raw-files-dir] ...]
W: [--output-text-symbols DIR]
W:
W: Package the android resources. It will read assets and resources that are
W: supplied with the -M -A -S or raw-files-dir arguments. The -J -P -F and -R
W: options control which files are output.
W:
W: aapt r[emove] [-v] file.{zip,jar,apk} file1 [file2 ...]
W: Delete specified files from Zip-compatible archive.
W:
W: aapt a[dd] [-v] file.{zip,jar,apk} file1 [file2 ...]
W: Add specified files to Zip-compatible archive.
W:
W: aapt c[runch] [-v] -S resource-sources ... -C output-folder ...
W: Do PNG preprocessing on one or several resource folders
W: and store the results in the output folder.
W:
W: aapt s[ingleCrunch] [-v] -i input-file -o outputfile
W: Do PNG preprocessing on a single file.
W:
W: aapt v[ersion]
W: Print program version.
W:
W: Modifiers:
W: -a print Android-specific data (resources, manifest) when listing
W: -c specify which configurations to include. The default is all

There's no option called --forced-package-id'
Wtf

[seisdr]

aapt version old?

[joakim-noah]

See instructions above and more recent ones here.

[jdnichollsc]

sorry guys, I'm a newbie
What're the commands to install Android sdk from terminal?
Thanks in advance!

[jdnichollsc]

I have the following issue downloading termux-packages via git and executing the command ./scripts/setup-android-sdk.sh:

Downloading android sdk...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  147M  100  147M    0     0  4537k      0  0:00:33  0:00:33 --:--:-- 4908k
tools.zip: OK
unzip: can't change directory to 'android-sdk': No such file or directory

Any help is really apreciated!

[ghost]

@jdnichollsc On which OS you are trying to install SDK ? In Termux it is not possible to use SDK/NDK.

For me it just worked fine:

[jdnichollsc]

Hi @xeffyr, thanks for your quickly response
I'm using Termux from Samsung Note 9, also testing with TermuxArch

[jdnichollsc]

@xeffyr what's the path of your termux-packages directory?

[ghost]

As I wrote above, it is not possible to use Android SDK and NDK in Termux. Unless your device is x86_64 and you running a Linux chroot.

Also, see https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/blob/master/build-package.sh#L12-L14.

[jdnichollsc]

@xeffyr thanks mate for your help, one last question, what's the value of your ANDROID_HOME variable?

[ghost]

It is unset. I don't need it as it is determined by script automatically.

[jdnichollsc]

@xeffyr I'm having this issue
Error: java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.RuntimeException: No server to serve request. Check logs for details. :app:mergeDebugResources FAILED FAILURE: Build failed with an exception. * What went wrong: Execution failed for task ':app:mergeDebugResources'. > Error: java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: java.lang.RuntimeException: No server to serve request. Check logs for details.

[jdnichollsc]

gradlew works without problems!

[jdnichollsc]

I only have issues with ADB, Is it possible to fix that?

[jdnichollsc]

@xeffyr sorry, my architecture is aarch64, so I can't use Android SDK :(

[jdnichollsc]

Hi guys,
This is the list with the instructions to run react native apps from x86_64 and running in a Linux chroot as Leonid says above https://gist.github.com/jdnichollsc/08a0d6a1b27962c4c4dd78ffbbfe768c

@xeffyr can you confirm please? Thanks for your help, I want to share that solution! 👍

[ghost]

You can use the Android SDK and Android NDK on other architectures other than x86_64. Make two rootfs' of ubuntu, one of your architecture, the other x86_64.

Proot into ubuntu of your arch, install openjdk-8-jdk. Create a script $PREFIX/java, bind required diretories for java in the ubuntu rootfs to run. I forgot which exactly, IIRC you need /bin, /etc, /lib, /run, /var. Don't bind with -r <root>, things will break when you try using java. Once java works, download the SDK, unzip to $PREFIX/opt/android-sdk. Download the NDK, unzip to $PREFIX/opt/android-sdk/ndk-bundle. In .bashrc or .zshrc, export ANDROID_HOME=$PREFIX/opt/android-sdk, and export NDK_HOME=$ANDROID_HOME/ndk-bundle. Add the SDK tools to your path for convinience, export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOMR/tools/bin. Now you can use things like sdkmanager, etc.

Now x86_64 time! Install unstable-repo in termux. Then install qemu-user-x86_64. For every x86_64 program in the SDK/NDK, you have to place proot with -q qemu-x86_64 infront of them. You can make a bash script that uses symlinks or something, for simplicity. Otherwise you'll be creating a hella lot of bash scripts.

I might make some sort of repo to simplify this process. It's a lot of trial and error, an absolute mess.

I built https://github.com/googlesamples/android-ndk/tree/master/native-activity on my phone:
unzip_me.zip

[zihadmahiuddin]

@Bakaika can you please create a guide or help me set this up?
I really need it.
Thank you very much.

[HemanthJabalpuri]

@ashish0304

See https://github.com/HemanthJabalpuri/AndroidExplorer for fixing your makefile.

or

https://github.com/amirzaidi/Launcher3/blob/o-mr1/Android.mk

or

https://github.com/BrahmaOS/brahmaos-packages-apps-GoodWeather/blob/master/Android.mk