Building and running Node.js for Android

/ By / In Thali /

The good news is that Node.js does run on Android. The bad news is that at least at the time I’m writing this the build process requires a few extra steps. Nothing too scary though. See below for details.

1 Building Node.js for Android

  1. Go find a Linux machine or maybe a Mac.
    1. These instructions don’t currently work on Windows due to issues with the sh scripts being used. Yes, I did try the scripts in MINGW32 and no it didn’t work.
  2. Go download the Android NDK.
    1. Which NDK to download does take a bit of attention. Most Android devices today are 32 bit so I want the Platform (32-bit target). But my Linux OS (Elementary OS) is 64 bit so I want Linux 64-bit (x86) under Platform (32-bit target).
  3. After downloading the NDK unzip it.
    1. Let’s assume you put the NDK into ~/android-ndk-r10b.
  4. Go clone node.
    1. Let’s assume you put that into ~/node. I am running these instructions off master branch.
  5. Check that you have all of node’s dependencies as listed 2 Using Node.js on Android via ADB
    Eventually I’ll write up an AAR that just wraps all the Node stuff and provides a standard API for launching node and feeding it a script. But that isn’t my current priority so instead I need to just get node onto my device and play with it.
    1. Issue the command “adb push ~/node/out/Release /data/local/tmp/Release”
      1. There is a step I’m skipping here. I actually do my development on Windows. So I copy the Release folder from my Linux VM (via Virtualbox) and then use the linked drive to move it to my Windows box. So in fact my adb push command above isn’t from the Linux location but my Windows location.
      2. The out/Release folder contains all the build artifacts for Node. Of this mess I suspect only the node executable is actually needed. But for the moment I’m going to play it safe and just move everything over.
      3. The reason for putting the node materials into /data/local/tmp/Release is because /data/local/tmp is one of the few areas where we can execute the chmod command in the next step and make Node executable. But when we wrap this thing up in an AAR we can actually use the setExecutable function instead.
    2. Issue “adb shell”. Once in the shell issue “chmod 700 /data/local/tmp/Release/node”
    3. I then issued an ’adb push’ for a simple hello world node program I have that I put inside of /data/local/tmp
      1. I used “Hello HTTP” from 3 What about NPM?
        In theory one should be able to use NPM on the Linux box and then just move the whole thing over to Android and run it there. But this only works if none of the dependencies use an add-on. An add-on requires compiling C code into a form Android can handle. It looks like NPM wants to support making this happen but so far I haven’t found the right voodoo. So I’m still investigating.