Installing Android SDK Tools

The Android SDK can be installed automatically using Jake Wharton's SDK Plugin or using the Android SDK Manager GUI or by manually downloading the SDK from the official site. Below is an overview of all three approaches.

Installing the Android SDK (Automated Way)

You can use Jake Wharton's SDK Manager to manage all missing SDK dependencies. It is particularly useful for simplifying the steps of retrieving the Build Tools or SDK version used in your project.

The android-sdk-manager plugin needs to be declared before the regular com.android.application plugin is applied. If you have multiple subprojects used in your app, make sure every build.gradle has this dependency included.

buildscript {
  repositories {
    mavenCentral()
  }
  dependencies {
    classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:0.12.+'
    classpath 'com.jakewharton.sdkmanager:gradle-plugin:0.12.+'
  }
}

apply plugin: 'android-sdk-manager' // run before com.android.application
apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

// optionally including an emulator
sdkManager {
  emulatorVersion 'android-19'
  emulatorArchitecture 'armeabi-v7a' // optional, defaults to arm
}

Installing the Android SDK (Manual Way)

Download the Android SDK without Eclipse bundled. Go to Android SDK and copy the URL for the SDK Tools Only download that's appropriate for your build machine OS.

Use wget with the correct SDK URL:

$ wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r22.6.2-macosx.zip

Unzip and place the contents within your home directory. The directory names can be anything you like, but I like the following setup. The Android SDK is in /Users/ciandroid/src/.

Now it's time to set your build environment's PATH variable and other variables that will be use to locate Android.

Edit your .bash_profile file. If you're not using bash, edit the right config file for your environment.

# Android 
export ANDROID_HOME=/Users/ciandroid/android-sdk-macosx
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/tools

Save and quit. Reload .bash_profile:

$ source ~./bash_profile

Installing via the GUI

At the prompt, type android and hit Enter to launch the Android SDK Manager in a window. If this doesn't work, your PATH variable has not been set up with the Android SDK location.

You will want to install the same Android SDK packages on your build machine as you did to get Gradle running locally. Before you begin, take a look at the build.gradle file in your project.

Packages to install

Here are the SDK package names you'll definitely wish to select:

• Android SDK Tools (latest version)
• Android SDK Platform-tools (latest version)
• Android SDK Build-tools (latest version)
• Android SDK Build-tools for the version of Android that you listed in the build.gradle file as the android: buildToolsVersion target. If your build.gradle says

    android {
        buildToolsVersion '17'
        ...
    }

then make sure to download that API version in the Android SDK Manager.

• Android SDK set for the API levels that you named in the android: compileSdkVersion section of your build.gradle file.

You will also want to download the extras:

• Android Support Repository
• Android Support Library

Downloading the SDK from the Command Line

You can also download the SDK packages using the command line with the --no-ui parameter.

android update sdk --no-ui --all

If you want to be selective about installing, you can use android list to view all the packages and apply the --filter option for selective installs:

sudo android update sdk --no-ui --filter platform-tools,tools

There is currently no filter to install the build tools directly. See this ticket for more information.

Installing the Android SDK (via Chef)

Finally, if you intend to incorporate Android builds into your continuous integration setup, you may want to use Chef or Puppet to help automate this process. These configuration management tools help automate the process of managing machine configurations in Amazon, Rackspace, Linode, or any cloud-based hosting service.

For Chef, you can download the chef-android-sdk recipe. It has a few dependencies, including Ark and 7-zip. This recipe should install the latest Android SDK tools and setup the environment variables in /etc/profile.d/android-sdk.sh.

wget https://github.com/gildegoma/chef-android-sdk/archive/master.zip
wget https://github.com/burtlo/ark/archive/master.zip
wget https://github.com/sneal/7-zip/archive/master.zip

Assuming you install chef-android-sdk, this recipe should install the latest Android SDK tools and setup the environment variables in /etc/profile.d/android-sdk.sh. You will want to insert this statement before running any command-line statements described in the previous section.

source /etc/profile.d/android-sdk.sh
sudo android update sdk --no-ui --filter platform-tools,tools

You should also run this shell script before running any Gradle commands:

source /etc/profile.d/android-sdk.sh
./gradlew build