CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidgitandroid-studio
stevendesu
stevendesu

Reputation: 16801

How to build an Android Studio project cloned from git?

I'm building a library for Android in Android Studio. In order to test and debug this library, I created a project with two modules: a library module (my code) and an app module (for testing)

Creating these was pretty easy. I just clicked File > New... > Project and followed the prompts. Afterwards I was able to write code, hit build, and observe the results in the app that was generated.

After a couple of months, everything was ready to deploy. I've been regularly committing my code and pushing it to a central repository, so another developer at my company cloned the repository and tried to open it in Android Studio. He was met with an entirely different view.

This is what I see:

enter image description here

This is what is seen if you clone the repo and open it:

enter image description here

When looking at the second view there's no way to build the project, there are no build configurations, no variants, and none of the gradle scripts seem to run.

If instead of cloning I just cp -r my entire project directory and open that in Android Studio, it opens perfectly. So the issue seems to lie with something in my .gitignore hiding an important configuration file necessary to build the project.

The .gitignore was generated for my automatically by Android Studio. It looks like this:

*.iml
.gradle
/local.properties
/.idea/caches
/.idea/libraries
/.idea/modules.xml
/.idea/workspace.xml
/.idea/navEditor.xml
/.idea/assetWizardSettings.xml
.DS_Store
/build
/captures
.externalNativeBuild

Everything there should be files generated by the build tools or local workspace configuration files, not project-level files necessary to compile. But I'm not very familiar with Android, its build steps, or the 800,000 things Android Studio is implicitly and secretly doing behind my back. Just opening the project in Android Studio causes 12 or so files to get modified on disk, so I know that it's doing a lot of things behind my back.

I can share any details about my configuration or project setup as necessary. I've spent a few hours on this already and can't figure out for the life of me how to get this project to build.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2753

Answers (1)

stevendesu
stevendesu

Reputation: 16801

While it's probably not the proper solution (after all, Android Studio created the .gitignore for me), I found that removing /.idea/modules.xml from the .gitignore and checking in this file fixed all of my issues. Suddenly when I launched Android Studio it detected everything, some Gradle scripts ran, and I was able to build my project.

Upvotes: 1

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