Hooking Up Android Gradle and Travis CI



I’ve recently started using Gradle as the build system for my Android projects. Travis CI is a very popular continuous integration tool for open source projects.

Hooking Up Travis CI to GitHub

To hook up Travis CI with Github, simply sign in using your GitHub account. Next, select which repos you want to hook up:

Finally, add a .travis.yml file, such as the sample provided below, then push to kick off a build:

android:
  components:
    # Uncomment the lines below if you want to
    # use the latest revision of Android SDK Tools
    # - platform-tools
    # - tools

    # The BuildTools version used by your project
    - build-tools-19.1.0

    # The SDK version used to compile your project
    - android-19

    # Additional components
    - extra-google-google_play_services
    - extra-google-m2repository
    - extra-android-m2repository
    - addon-google_apis-google-19

    # Specify at least one system image,
    # if you need to run emulator(s) during your tests
    - sys-img-armeabi-v7a-android-19
    - sys-img-x86-android-17

Depending on the load, Travis CI will then kick off a build and email you the results.

Hooking Up Android Gradle to Travis CI

I found Travis CI to be difficult to integrate with Android Gradle from scratch, as the support is still in beta and there is a lack of documentation:

For example, I ran into the following cryptic issue:

Which I fixed by adding the following to my .travis.yml:

chmod +x grailsw

Ultimately, a blank slate configuration of Android Gradle with Travis CI (in its current beta Android integration) proved to be quite a difficult task. I decided to take a step back and evaluate other options.

android-tdd-playground

android-tdd-playground is a good starting point to enable your projects to use Gradle, Travis CI, and even the Android Testing Framework. I simply forked the project and started moving over components from my Flickr Android app to the "playground" and customized as needed.

I recommend taking this approach when first starting with Travis CI, as it streamlines the integration and allows you to focus on your app.

Travis CI Badge:

The Travis CI badge gives visual feedback of the state of the last build.  Adding the Travis CI build results is just one line of code to your README markdown: