Robolectric build-android.sh tutorial

Note: Based on Android documentation.

This tutorial will allow you to run the build-android.sh script in the Robolectric repository, resulting in the corresponding Android version's android-all jar.

1. Installing Repo

Repo is a tool that makes it easier to work with Git in the context of Android. For more information about Repo, see the Developing section.

To install Repo make sure you have a bin/ directory in your home directory and that it is included in your path:

$ mkdir ~/bin
$ PATH=~/bin:$PATH

Download the Repo tool and ensure that it is executable:

$ curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
$ chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

2. Initializing a Repo client

After installing Repo, set up your client to access the Android source repository:

Create an empty directory to hold your working files. If you're using MacOS, this has to be on a case-sensitive filesystem. Give it any name you like:

$ mkdir <WORKING_DIRECTORY>
$ cd <WORKING_DIRECTORY>

Configure git with your real name and email address. To use the Gerrit code-review tool, you will need an email address that is connected with a registered Google account. Make sure this is a live address at which you can receive messages. The name that you provide here will show up in attributions for your code submissions.

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"
$ git config --global user.email "you@example.com"

3. Grab dependencies

On Ubuntu run

$ sudo apt-get install git-core gnupg gnupg-agent flex bison gperf build-essential \
zip curl zlib1g-dev gcc-multilib g++-multilib libc6-dev-i386 \
lib32ncurses5-dev x11proto-core-dev libx11-dev lib32z-dev ccache \
libgl1-mesa-dev libxml2-utils xsltproc unzip libswitch-perl

4. Run sync-android.sh to sync and build source

Now use repo to sync the android source, and then build.

./sync-android.sh <root source location> <android version> <# parallel jobs>

The currently supported Android versions are:

4.1.2_r1 - Jelly Bean API 16
4.2.2_r1.2 - Jelly Bean MR1 API 17
4.3_r2 - Jelly Bean MR2 API 18
4.4_r1 - Kit Kat API 19
5.0.2_r3 - Lollipop API 21
5.1.1_r9 - Lollipop MR1 API 22
6.0.1_r3 - Marshmallow API 23
7.0.0_r1 - Nougat API 24
7.1.0_r7 - Nougat MR1 API 25
8.0.0_r4 - Oreo API 26

Beware it can take upwards of 100 GB of space to sync and build.

For more infomation see Downloading and Building

Choose a <# parallel jobs> value roughly equal to # of free cores on your machine. YMMV.

7. Run build-android.sh

Signing Artifacts: The end of the script will prompt you to sign the new artifacts using GPG. See Performing a Release for instructions on obtaining a GPG key pair.

(Optional) You will be prompted a total of 4 times (once for each artifact). To make this easier, run this command beforehand:

$ gpg-agent --daemon

Finally, in your Robolectric directory run:

$ export SIGNING_PASSWORD=<Passphrase for GPG signing key>
$ build-android.sh <Path to AOSP source directory> <android version> <robolectric sub-version>

For Robolectric version 6.0.1_r3-robolectric-0, android version would be 6.0.1_r3 and robolectric sub-version 0.