Comments on: Setting Up An Android Project Build

By: Blah McBlah

Blah McBlah — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:11:08 +0000

Google’s docs [1] explicitly encourage you to nest the test project into the main project, but AFAICS that’s not even officially supported by eclipse [2][3]. And EGit advises you not to use an eclipse project as the root of the git repository. So personally, right now I’m trying a setup like.

blah/
blah/.git
blah/Blah/
blah/Blah/AndroidManifest.xml
… etc.
blah/BlahTest/
blah/BlahTest/AndroidManifest.xml
… etc.

[1] http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/testing/testing_eclipse.html

[2] http://wiki.eclipse.org
/Top_Ten_Architectural_Problems_in_all_of_Eclipse

[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=35973

By: James Wald

James Wald — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:13:42 +0000

Thanks so much for this guide. While I had a bunch of hiccups along the way, I eventually got through it successfully. As far as your footnote:

“1 For reasons unknown to me, when my projects were first created they had build errors. A clean rebuild magically fixed the problem.”

This is caused by the ADT eclipse plugin not generating the gen source directory or R.java when they are missing or out of date. Sometimes a clean will cause ADT to kick in on the next build, but more often than not it won’t. Doing a clean then restarting eclipse is the best way to get the build to work again. I hope Google addresses this in an upcoming version of the ADT plugin.

And that ant bug is still a bug in the version of ant that I have, thanks for providing the link to that bug report and workaround!

One more note… you mention to include .settings in source control, unfortunately my .settings is an empty directory and I use Mercurial which only tracks files. I’ve been using MakeEmptyDirs to add placeholders inside empty directories so I can retain directory structures in my repository. After following this guide I had to run the tool again to pick up 3 new empty directories: .settings, libs, and test/libs

Thanks again.

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 03:36:48 +0000

Thanks for the tips! I was starting a project with someone and they had started it in Eclipse (ew) but I needed to build via command line. I’m glad all I needed was ‘android update project’!

By: Blogging Round the World | Android Türkiye

Blogging Round the World | Android Türkiye — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:55:32 +0000

[...] and Jason Sankey from Sydney run the Android-dense a little madness, and lay the rules out in Setting Up An Android Project Build. Lots of steps; but very handy for a command-line guy like [...]

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By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:01:19 +0000

Hi k5rud,

No, you don’t want to put the .metadata directory under version control. It contains a bunch of state information for your Eclipse workspace, which is changing all the time.

Just check in .classpath and .project, and when setting up the project on the new machine use File > Import … > General > Existing Project Into Workspace.

By: k5rud

k5rud — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 21:15:35 +0000

Mind helping out a somewhat new Eclipse / Jave / Android user with a question?

When putting the Project directory under version control should the Eclipse .metadata directory be VC’d?

One of my concerns is switching between my desktop and laptop machines for development. I don’t want files VC’d that will confuse the setup between the systems.

By: Blogging Round the World | teknology

Blogging Round the World | teknology — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:16:25 +0000

[...] Android-dense a little madness, and lay the rules out in Setting Up An Android Project Build. Lots of steps; but very handy for a command-line guy like [...]