Building and testing with Cordova and Ionic

If you have issues, they can normally be cleared up with some simple edits to the .bashrc file, or Java may need a bit of a makeover.

For starters, if the ANDROID_HOME path is off you can find it in Android Studio by loading a working app then locating the path by clicking Tool > Android > SDK Manager. At the top, you will see the path and that will become ANDROID_HOME.

With Java, you could install the Java JDK from Oracle after downloading using simple directions from www.java.com/en/download/help/ linux_x64_install.xml. In this case, the folder /usr/java was created and the downloaded tar file was moved to that folder. After extraction, the new folder jdk1.8.0_121 is created. This becomes JAVA_HOME. You will likely want to uninstall and remove old versions which could reside in the folder /usr/lib/jvm/. export JAVA_HOME='/usr/java/jdk1.8.0_121’ export ANDROID_HOME='/home/ myusername/Android/Sdk’ export PATH=${PATH}:$ANDROID_HOME/ platform-tools:$ANDROID_HOME/tools

After making changes to .bashrc you can run the command source ~\.bashrc, open a new terminal and see if both paths have been set using the following:

echo $JAVA_HOME echo $ANDROID_HOME

Now you can build and run again using the commands mentioned earlier.

To load the project into Android Studio, use File > Open > Select App folder > Platforms > Android. Android will guide you through a setup process after that, and make sure to choose an SDK when prompted.

Now you can test your Cordova app or Ionic app just as you would a native app. One key note is that you can add many other plugins to Cordova to perform functions such as get geolocation and to store data.