Build project without internet connection

Question

I have project that is required to work on in offline mode without any internet connection due to security reasons. My androidStudio defined to offline mode. When I run assemble release via Task/build/assembleRelease everything work just fine and I build my apk. But when running via command line command:

gradlew --offline assembleRelease

I get bunch of errors than no cashed version of this and that. When I fix one error and copy some files to cache then I get new error that something else missing.

So, how is assembleRelease via androidStudio works? How can I run the same command via cmd or remotely, because it seems have all the cache needed. What is the difference running assembleRelease from studio vs from cmd?

Also I know the simple solution, run it one time online and then it works. Can`t do so...

As my PC is capable of building APK overall, how can I do so without androidStudio just via cmd or remotely?

Answer 1

First of all, it really surprises me that you can build your project using Android Studio, but not by calling Gradle directly. Different Gradle versions could be one reason, but since you already use the Gradle wrapper, it is rather unlikely. Maybe Android Studio is not configured to use the wrapper.

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However, I would definitively advise against copying dependencies between the Gradle caches of different systems. Instead, I would encourage you to collect the required dependencies in an offline repository, e.g. a flatDir repository:

repositories {
    flatDir name: 'offlineRepository', dirs: "C:/path/to/repository"
}

Sadly, flatDir repositories do not support transitive dependencies from descriptor files like Maven .pom files, but you can also define maven or ivy repositories for a local filesystem location:

repositories {
    maven {
        name = 'offlineRepository'
        url = uri('file:///c:/path/to/repository')
    }
}

If it should be possible to build your project from both an online and your specific offline environment, you may think about defining an initialization script on your local machine, that substitutes any defined repository with your offline repository.