Building Android binary

In this article, we briefly describe how to build Android binary using Android NDK cross-compiler on Debian Linux.

The easiest way to build android binary is use Dockerfile.android. See Dockerfile.android for more details. If you cannot use Dockerfile.android for whatever reason, continue to read the rest of this article.

We offer android-config script to make the build easier. To make the script work, NDK directory must be set to NDK environment variable. NDK directory is the directory where NDK is unpacked:

$ unzip android-ndk-$NDK_VERSION-linux.zip
$ cd android-ndk-$NDK_VERSION
$ export NDK=$PWD

The dependent libraries, such as OpenSSL, libev, and c-ares should be built with the same NDK toolchain and installed under $NDK/usr/local. We recommend to build these libraries as static library to make the deployment easier. libxml2 support is currently disabled.

Although zlib comes with Android NDK, it seems not to be a part of public API, so we have to built it for our own. That also provides us proper .pc file as a bonus.

Before running android-config, NDK environment variable must be set to point to the correct path.

You need to set NGHTTP2 environment variable to the absolute path to the source directory of nghttp2.

To configure OpenSSL, use the following script:

#!/bin/sh

. $NGHTTP2/android-env

export ANDROID_NDK_HOME=$NDK
export PATH=$TOOLCHAIN/bin:$PATH

./Configure no-shared --prefix=$PREFIX android-arm64

And run the following script to build and install without documentation:

#!/bin/sh

. $NGHTTP2/android-env

export PATH=$TOOLCHAIN/bin:$PATH

make install_sw

To configure libev, use the following script:

#!/bin/sh

. $NGHTTP2/android-env

./configure \
    --host=$TARGET \
    --build=`dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE` \
    --prefix=$PREFIX \
    --disable-shared \
    --enable-static \
    CPPFLAGS=-I$PREFIX/include \
    LDFLAGS=-L$PREFIX/lib

And run make install to build and install.

To configure c-ares, use the following script:

#!/bin/sh -e

. $NGHTTP2/android-env

./configure \
    --host=$TARGET \
    --build=`dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE` \
    --prefix=$PREFIX \
    --disable-shared

And run make install to build and install.

To configure zlib, use the following script:

#!/bin/sh -e

. $NGHTTP2/android-env

export HOST=$TARGET

./configure \
    --prefix=$PREFIX \
    --libdir=$PREFIX/lib \
    --includedir=$PREFIX/include \
    --static

And run make install to build and install.

After prerequisite libraries are prepared, run android-config and then make to compile nghttp2 source files.

If all went well, application binaries, such as nghttpx, are created under src directory. Strip debugging information from the binary using the following command:

$ $NDK/toolchains/llvm/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/llvm-strip src/nghttpx