How to build Qt5 for Android?

Question

I have a server running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

I would like to put the server to use building Qt5 for the Android ARMv6 platform. How does one go about doing this on a headless server?

Answer 1

The steps necessary for compiling Qt5 for Android on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS are described below. For the sake of convenience, I will assume that all of the commands below are run in the directory /opt/qt5-android. You will need to adjust the paths accordingly if this is not the case.

1. First you will need to make sure the appropriate packages are installed:

   sudo apt-get install build-essential openjdk-6-jdk
   

2. Grab the latest Android SDK:

   wget http://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r21.1-linux.tgz
   tar -xf android-sdk_r21.1-linux.tgz
   

3. The SDK doesn't ship with any platforms, so you will need to grab them:

   android-sdk-linux/tools/android update sdk --no-ui
   

4. Grab the latest version of the NDK:

   32-bit (i686):

   wget http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r8e-linux-x86.tar.bz2
   tar -xf android-ndk-r8e-linux-x86.tar.bz2
   

   64-bit (amd64):

   wget http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r8e-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
   tar -xf android-ndk-r8e-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
   

5. Now clone the following Git repository:

   git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qt5.git qt5
   cd qt5
   perl init-repository --no-webkit
   

6. We're almost there. Now we need to configure and make Qt5:

   ./configure \
       -developer-build \
       -xplatform android-g++ \
       -nomake tests \
       -nomake examples \
       -android-ndk /opt/qt5-android/android-ndk-r8e \
       -android-sdk /opt/qt5-android/android-sdk-linux \
       -skip qttools \
       -skip qttranslations \
       -skip qtwebkit \
       -skip qtserialport \
       -skip qtwebkit-examples-and-demos
   make
   

And that's it! You should now end up with a Qt5 build for Android.

---

References:

• Building Qt5 for Android
• Is there a way to automate the android sdk installation?

Answer 2

I don't mean to respond to another answer with an answer but this is my first post :-( and I think that that prevents me from posting this in a comment. (so consider it a citation of said answer, not a reply to it) Nathan's own answer above didn't work exactly for me.

My configure line looked more like so:

./configure \
-developer-build -platform linux-g++-64 \
-xplatform android-g++ \
-nomake tests \
-nomake examples \
-android-ndk /opt/qt5-android/android-ndk-r8e \
-android-sdk /opt/qt5-android/android-sdk-linux \
-skip qttools \
-skip qttranslations \
-skip qtwebkit \
-skip qtserialport \
-android-ndk-host linux-x86_64

Here's why:

• -skip qtwebkit-examples-and-demos caused an error in configure... It didn't like that I was skipping something that couldn't be built anyway (sorry, I lost the exact error message)

• -android-ndk-host linux-x86_64 stopped configure from aborting with " Can not detect the android host. Please use -android-ndk-host option to specify one"

• -platform linux-g++-64 is me being paranoid about whether or not configure will add the -m64 flag or whatever when working its magic for me

Other than this difference, Nathan's procedure seemed to work like a charm. My local environment building now (thanks for the tips, Mr Osman :-)