tanob's blog

Android maven project with a native dependency

02 Jul 2013

In my current Android project we’re using the Android maven plugin and recently we got a pre-built native library (.so) as a dependency.

I had some trial and errors and had to read the plugin’s source code to get it working, the project’s wiki about it isn’t up-to-date on how to do it.

First, as this native dependency is not in a Maven repository, we’re using the maven install plugin to install it in the local maven repository:

<plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-install-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.4</version>
        <inherited>false</inherited>

        <executions>
            <execution>
                <id>foo-native</id>
                <goals><goal>install-file</goal></goals>
                <phase>initialize</phase>
                <configuration>
                    <file>${project.basedir}/tmp/libFoo.so</file>
                    <groupId>com.foo.bar</groupId>
                    <artifactId>libFoo</artifactId>
                    <version>1.0</version>
                    <packaging>so</packaging>
                    <classifier>armeabi</classifier>
                </configuration>
            </execution>
        </executions>
    </plugin>

It is important to set the packaging as “so” and set the classifier with the shared-object’s target architecture. In our case it is “armeabi” but the plugin also recognize these others: “armeabi-v7a”, “mips” and “x86”.

After getting the dependency installed you’ll list it under your <dependencies> like this:

<dependency>
        <groupId>com.foo.bar</groupId>
        <artifactId>libFoo</artifactId>
        <version>1.0</version>
        <type>so</type>
        <classifier>armeabi</classifier>
    </dependency>

That’s it, after running mvn clean package the generated APK should have the .so:

$ jar tf app/target/app.apk | grep armeabi
lib/armeabi/libFoo.so