"android: can't find sdkmanager.jar"

Question

I downloaded the Android SDK tools from https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html which gave me a zip file called tools_r25.2.3-linux.zip. Unziped, it produced a folder called tools, containing the sdkmanager, android. When I tried to run it, it failed with the error message above.

I set ANDROID_HOME to the tools directory, but it still failed.

Answer 1

It turns out that ANDROID_HOME needs to be set to the parent directory, with the contents of the zip file (a single directory named tools) contained within it. Once I did that, it worked fine. This seemed confusing enough to be worth adding to stackoverflow.

Answer 2

The zip file can be opened anywhere. The important thing is to leave the name "tools" and it's files intact.

Run the android program from the tools parent directory as:

$ ./tools/android

This will update the tools parent directory (the one from where you are running ./tools/android) with a number of folders and tools.

I name this parent directory sdk. I also place the whole directory (named sdk) in a folder by the name of the downloaded version.

Now for consistency of my programming environment I bind mount this sdk to a folder in the /opt directory so that it'll be available system-wide.

The hierarchy becomes:

/home/userid/android_r25.2.3/sdk

Now I make a folder in the /opt/ directory called /opt/android/sdk.

My /etc/fstab entry for this becomes:

/home/userid/android_r25.2.3/sdk  /opt/android/sdk none bind

It's mounted with:

$ sudo mount /opt/android/sdk

The only thing that changes with new versions or new installs is the location of where the zip file is opened. replace the /home/userid/android_r25.2.3/sdk with where you extract the zipfile and nothing else would ever have to be changed.

The PATH variable will consistently become:

$ export PATH=$PATH:/opt/android/sdk/tools:/opt/android/sdk/platform-tools

And, of course, the eclipse android configuration becomes:

/opt/android/sdk

Using this as a consistent procedure makes reinstalls and installs on new machines very seamless... having only one variable that might change, and that is where the package is extracted.