Building and Deploying an Android app from the Shell

android-compile.bash

#!/bin/bash
#
#  android-compile.bash
#  Cleans, compiles, installs and starts your Android project.
#
#  Copyright (C) 2013 Ben Arnold
#
#  This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
#  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
#  (at your option) any later version.
#
#  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#  GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#  Visit http://www.gnu.org/licenses for the GNU General Public License.

PACKAGE=$1
ACTIVITY=$2

if [[ -z $PACKAGE || -z $ACTIVITY]]; then
  echo " ! If you supply both the package name of your application and your main activity, we can automagically start it."
fi

function progress() {
  while true ; do
    echo -n "·"
    sleep 1
  done
}

echo " * Cleaning up..."
  progress &
  PROGRESS_BAR=$!
  ant clean -silent  ||  ( killall sh ; exit $? )
  kill $PROGRESS_BAR
  wait $PROGRESS_BAR 2>/dev/null

echo " * Build started at $(date)" ; echo -n "   "
  progress &
  PROGRESS_BAR=$!
  ant release -quiet  ||  ( killall sh ; exit $? )
  kill $PROGRESS_BAR
  wait $PROGRESS_BAR 2>/dev/null
echo " · Build finished at $(date)."

APK=$(ls -1 bin/*.apk | head -n1)
echo " · Saved to: $APK"

if [[ ! -z $(adb devices | tail -n+2 | head -n-1) ]] ; then
  echo " * Installing..."
    adb -d install -r $APK  ||  exit $?

  if [[ (! -z "$PACKAGE") && (! -z "$ACTIVITY") ]]; then
    echo " * Starting..."
      adb shell "am start -n $PACKAGE/.$ACTIVITY"  ||  exit $?
      adb -d logcat $PACKAGE:D System.out:I *:S  ||  exit $?
  fi
fi

desc

Eclipse is a productive environment for developing an Android application, but I still spend a lot of time at the shell working with Git, so I wondered if I could use Vim and a script to code and build/deploy my app.

I summised that I'd need my Vim to format Java files the same way as Eclipse, which means:

*  indenting lines with one, four-character tabstop (Ruby is two spaces)
*  using one tabstop instead four spaces (Ruby is spaces instead of tabs)
*  ending each file with a blank line (I like Vim to chomp whitespace off of the end of lines and end the file at the last line of text, as Git is whitespace-observant by default)

Adding this into my .vimrc allowed for these rules only in Java files:

    au FileType java :setlocal softtabstop=4 tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 noexpandtab

It's the `setlocal` that tells Vim to use these settings only in the current buffer, and not for the rest of the session (i.e. when you open another file). I also needed the colon in there for some reason.

With my Vim featuring syntax highlighting, autocompletion and the like, I can now code Java without going against the coding style used by Eclipse. The only problem, however, is that coding solely Ruby, JavaScript and Bash/Zsh for the past few years has left my Java skills too weak without the keyword and syntax helpers and code block auto-generation that Eclipse provides. Still, I find Git and this build script a lot quicker to use and run than the equivalent process in Eclipse, even if I'm not coding in Vim.