Android

Building Android from master branch

This is a simple guide on how to build Minetest for Android on Ubuntu on a 64 bit system. Building on 32 bit systems should work too when the URLs and paths are replaced accordingly. This guide covers all preparation needed. Once everything is set up, Minetest only needs cd build/android && make to compile.

Required packages

Git, Make, and other basic tools are neccessary: <br\>
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install make m4 subversion git-core build-essential realpath openjdk-8-jdk

Gradle is required as well. If your distribution gives you gradle 2.10 or later (like Ubuntu 16.04 does), you may simply do:

sudo apt-get install gradle

If your distribution ships with an older version of gradle, you may grab a recent version of gradle via a PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cwchien/gradle
sudo apt-get install gradle-2.13

As your architecture is 64 bit, you need additional packages.

On newer systems do: (Ubuntu 16.04-ish):

sudo apt-get install lib32z1

On older systems do:

sudo apt-get install --force-yes libgd2-xpm ia32-libs ia32-libs-multiarch

Getting the SDK and NDK

Both SDK and NDK are needed:

wget https://dl.google.com/android/android-sdk_r24.4.1-linux.tgz <br\> wget https://dl.google.com/android/repository/android-ndk-r16b-linux-x86_64.zip <br\> <br\> tar xf android-sdk_r24.4.1-linux.tgz <br\> unzip android-ndk-r16b-linux-x86_64.zip <br\> <br\> android-sdk-linux/tools/android update sdk --no-ui -a --filter platform-tool,android-26,build-tools-26.0.3 <br\>

The last line will ask for your confirmation multiple times.

Obtaining and building Minetest

Clone Minetest, and build it:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/minetest/minetest.git <br\> cd minetest/build/android <br\> make<br\>

The make file will ask you for the paths to your SDK and NDK. It will then download and build all required libraries. Finally it will build Minetest and the Java sources and pack everything into a debug-signed APK.

Releasing Minetest APK

Perform the release

Build

First you should have a release build.

Ensure minetest_game is on the right git tag in games/minetest_game folder

cd games/minetest_game

git reset --hard

git checkout 0.4.17

cd -

Then you can perform the release

cd build/android

make release

This generates an apk file here: build/outputs/apk/Minetest-release-unsigned.apk

Package

This apk file cannot be installed and needs two steps: sign & zipalign.

jarsigner -verbose -digestalg SHA1 -sigalg MD5withRSA -keystore $KEYSTORE_FOLDER/keystore-minetest.jks build/outputs/apk/Minetest-release-unsigned.apk Minetest

$ANDROID_SDK/build-tools/28.0.0/zipalign -v 4 build/outputs/apk/Minetest-release-unsigned.apk Minetest-release.apk

Deploy

You can now install the release on your phone. It's located inside the current folder.

adb install Minetest-release.apk

Publish on the Play Store

The Google Play Store app uses public beta for testers before making it available for many users.

You should first publish the beta release here.

When the test is complete and valid, click on Create the production version and publish it.