NDK not configured (although it is installed)—how to fix without Android Studio

Question

I am trying to build an Android project with Gradle. The project uses native code and thus needs NDK, which I have installed.

However, Gradle fails with the following error:

> NDK not configured. 
  Download it with SDK manager.

Android’s SDK Manager does not list NDK as an option. Besides, I have NDK installed on my box, so the error seems to be that Gradle isn’t finding it.

Most answers assume users to have Android Studio, which I do not have and do not want. Any way to fix this without?

Answer 1

Most answers assume users to have Android Studio, which I do not have and do not want. Any way to fix this without?

Yes, you don't have to install Android Studio.

For your existing Android project, I expect that you already have local.properties under your root dir of your project. Open and modify there to set your NDK dir. For example, your NDK version is android-ndk-r17b (https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/), and you have installed (or unzipped) it in directory /Users/myname/foo/xxx/Android/android-ndk-r17b, then modify this file as below:

ndk.dir=/Users/myname/foo/xxx/Android/android-ndk-r17b 
sdk.dir=/Users/myname/foo/xxx/Android/sdk

Answer 2

Make sure you have an environment variable ANDROID_NDK_HOME set and pointing to your NDK install directory. In my case this did the trick:

export ANDROID_NDK_HOME=/home/myself/bin/android-ndk-r10e

You may want to add this to your .bashrc or similar to have the variable inserted at login, or run the command above each time you launch a shell and want to build an NDK project.

As an alternative, if you installed ndk-bundle through sdkmanager, it will be found without an extra environment variable.