Android studio, gradle and NDK

Question

I am very new to this whole gradle and Android Studio support. I have managed to convert my android project to gradle using the export option.

But I am looking for some documentation or start point how to integrate the NDK build into the gradle build process.

If possible I also need some sort of "after" stage that copies the build binaries (.so files) to the asset directory.

Answer 1

While I believe SJoshi (oracle guy) has the most complete answer, the SWIG project is a special case, interesting and useful one, at that, but not generalized for the majority of projects that have done well with the standard SDK ant based projects + NDK. We all would like to be using Android studio now most likely, or want a more CI friendly build toolchain for mobile, which gradle theoretically offers.

I've posted my approach, borrowed from somewhere (I found this on SO, but posted a gist for the app build.gradle: https://gist.github.com/truedat101/c45ff2b69e91d5c8e9c7962d4b96e841 ). In a nutshell, I recommend the following:

• Don't upgrade your project to the latest gradle build
• Use com.android.tools.build:gradle:1.5.0 in your Project root
• Use com.android.application in your app project
• Make sure gradle.properties has: android.useDeprecatedNdk=true (in case it's complaining)
• Use the above approach to ensure that your hours and hours of effort creating Android.mk files won't be tossed away. You control which targets arch(s) to build. And these instructions are kind to Windows users, who should theoretically be able to build on windows without special issues.

Gradle for Android has been a mess in my opinion, much as I like the maven concepts borrowed and the opinionated structure of directories for a project. This NDK feature has been "coming soon" for almost 3+ years.

Answer 2

A good answer automating the packaging of readily compiled .so-files is given in another (closed) thread. To get that working, I had to change the line:

from fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: '**/*.so')

into:

from fileTree(dir: 'src/main/libs', include: '**/*.so') 

Without this change the .so files were not found, and the task for packaging them would therefore never run.

Answer 3

The answer from @plaisthos broke in the latest gradle version, but there is still a way to do it. Create a native-libs directory in the root of your project directory and copy all y our libs into this directory.

Add the following lines to your build.gradle. Build and be happy.

task copyNativeLibs(type: Copy) {
    from(new File(project(':<your project>').getProjectDir(), 'native-libs')) { include '**/*.so' }
    into new File(buildDir, 'native-libs')
}

tasks.withType(Compile) { compileTask -> compileTask.dependsOn copyNativeLibs }

clean.dependsOn 'cleanCopyNativeLibs'

Answer 4

This is the code i use to build using android-ndk from gradle. For this add ndk directory path in gradle.properties ie . add ndkdir=/home/user/android-ndk-r9d and put all jni files in a folder native in src/main/ as you can see from code posted below. It will create jar with native libs which you can use normally as in System.loadLibrary("libraryname");

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: "$buildDir/native-libs", include: '*.jar')
}

task ndkBuild(type: Exec) {
    commandLine "$ndkdir/ndk-build", "--directory", "$projectDir/src/main/native", '-j', Runtime.runtime.availableProcessors(),
            "APP_PLATFORM=android-8",
            "APP_BUILD_SCRIPT=$projectDir/src/main/native/Android.mk",
            "NDK_OUT=$buildDir/native/obj",
            "NDK_APP_DST_DIR=$buildDir/native/libs/\$(TARGET_ARCH_ABI)"
}

task nativeLibsToJar(type: Jar, description: 'create a jar with native libs') {
    destinationDir file("$buildDir/native-libs")
    baseName 'native-libs'
    from fileTree(dir: "$buildDir/native/libs", include: '**/*.so')
    into 'lib/'
}

tasks.withType(JavaCompile) {
    compileTask -> compileTask.dependsOn nativeLibsToJar
}

nativeLibsToJar.dependsOn 'ndkBuild'

Answer 5

To expand on what Naxos said (Thanks Naxos for sending me in the right direction!), I learned quite a bit from the recently released NDK examples and posted an answer in a similar question here.

How to configure NDK with Android Gradle plugin 0.7

This post has full details on linking prebuilt native libraries into your app for the various architectures as well as information on how to add NDK support directly to the build.gradle script. For the most part, you shouldn't need to do the work around zip and copy anymore.

Answer 6

In Google IO 2015, Google announced full NDK integration in Android Studio 1.3.

It is now out of preview, and available to everyone: https://developer.android.com/studio/projects/add-native-code.html

Old answer: Gradle automatically calls ndk-build if you have a jni directory in your project sources.

This is working on Android studio 0.5.9 (canary build).

1. Download the NDK
2. Either add ANDROID_NDK_HOME to your environment variables or add ndk.dir=/path/to/ndk to your local.properties in your Android Studio project. This allows Android studio to run the ndk automatically.
3. Download the latest gradle sample projects to see an example of an ndk project. (They're at the bottom of the page). A good sample project is ndkJniLib.

4. Copy the gradle.build from the NDK sample projects. It'll look something like this. This gradle.build creates a different apk for each architecture. You must select which architecture you want using the build variants pane.

   apply plugin: 'android'
   
   dependencies {
       compile project(':lib')
   }
   
   android {
       compileSdkVersion 19
       buildToolsVersion "19.0.2"
   
       // This actual the app version code. Giving ourselves 100,000 values [0, 99999]
       defaultConfig.versionCode = 123
   
       flavorDimensions "api", "abi"
   
       productFlavors {
           gingerbread {
               flavorDimension "api"
               minSdkVersion 10
               versionCode = 1
           }
           icecreamSandwich {
               flavorDimension "api"
               minSdkVersion 14
               versionCode = 2
           }
           x86 {
               flavorDimension "abi"
               ndk {
                   abiFilter "x86"
               }
               // this is the flavor part of the version code.
               // It must be higher than the arm one for devices supporting
               // both, as x86 is preferred.
               versionCode = 3
           }
           arm {
               flavorDimension "abi"
               ndk {
                   abiFilter "armeabi-v7a"
               }
               versionCode = 2
           }
           mips {
               flavorDimension "abi"
               ndk {
                   abiFilter "mips"
               }
               versionCode = 1
           }
           fat {
               flavorDimension "abi"
               // fat binary, lowest version code to be
               // the last option
               versionCode = 0
           }
       }
   
       // make per-variant version code
       applicationVariants.all { variant ->
           // get the version code of each flavor
           def apiVersion = variant.productFlavors.get(0).versionCode
           def abiVersion = variant.productFlavors.get(1).versionCode
   
           // set the composite code
           variant.mergedFlavor.versionCode = apiVersion * 1000000 + abiVersion * 100000 + defaultConfig.versionCode
       }
   
   }
   

Note that this will ignore your Android.mk and Application.mk files. As a workaround, you can tell gradle to disable atuomatic ndk-build call, then specify the directory for ndk sources manually.

sourceSets.main {
    jniLibs.srcDir 'src/main/libs' // use the jni .so compiled from the manual ndk-build command
    jni.srcDirs = [] //disable automatic ndk-build call
}

In addition, you'll probably want to call ndk-build in your gradle build script explicitly, because you just disabled the automatic call.

task ndkBuild(type: Exec) {
   commandLine 'ndk-build', '-C', file('src/main/jni').absolutePath
}

tasks.withType(JavaCompile) {
    compileTask -> compileTask.dependsOn ndkBuild
}