A template for building Python apps that will run under Android.
Install cookiecutter. This is a tool used to bootstrap complex project templates:
$ pip install cookiecutter
Run
cookiecutter
on the Python-Android template:$ cookiecutter https://github.com/pybee/Python-Android-template
Download the Python Android support package. This JAR file should be placed in the
libs
directory.Alternatively, you can download the full VOC project, and build your own versions of these libraries.
If this all worked, a project called myproject
should have a directory
structure that looks something like:
android/ app/ ... app_packages/ ... libs/ python-android.jar res/ ... src/ ... AndroidManifest.xml ant.properties build.xml local.properties LICENSE proguard-project.txt project.properties
Install voc, the Python to Java bytecode transpiler:
$ pip install voc
You're now ready to build and run your project! Define a MainActivity
class in app/myproject.py
, and run:
$ ant debug
in the top level project directory (android
by default).
To run the app on your phone, you'll need to plug it in to a USB port, and configure your phone for development. The Android developer documentation has a full set of instructions:
http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html#setting-up
Then, run the following (substituting your project name for myproject
):
$ adb install -r bin/myproject-debug.apk $ adb shell am start -n python.myproject/python.myproject.MainActivity
This will compile, install and run your new Android project on your device.
If you want to see the logs produced by this code while it runs, use:
$ adb logcat VOC:* *:E DEBUG:*
This will output:
- All the log messages produced by Python code
- All ERROR level log messages
- Any message produced by the DEBUG crash reporting system.
Of course, just running Python code isn't very interesting by itself - you'll be able to output to the console, but if you tap the icon on your phone, you won't see anything on the screen - you'll only see content in the logs.
To do something interesting, you'll need to work with the native Android system libraries to draw widgets and respond to screen taps.
Alternatively, you could use a library like toga that provides a cross-platform widget toolkit that supports Android.
If you have any external library dependencies (like toga, or any other
third-party library), you should install the library code into the
app_packages
directory. This directory is the same as a site_packages
directory on a desktop Python install.
It's also worth noting that the app
and app_packages
code don't need
to contain the actual code. If it's more convenient to keep the code
somewhere else, you can symlink to the actual code inside the app
or
app_packages
directory. At compile time, the symlink will be resolved and
copied to the app bundle, but during development, you can avoid having copies
of code in your source repositories.
One pattern for doing this is to have a top level project directory that
contains the source module, and an android
directory at the same level
that links in the project source:
myproject/ android/ app/ myproject -> ../../myproject ... myproject/ __init__.py main.py other.py setup.py