How to Generate Gradlew on to Jenkins? - jenkins

Question

How to generate gradlew file to Jenkins Android Project? My project is not Android Native. My project is Flutter.
I try to create CD with Jenkins and I got some errors.
this is my pipeline code (JenkinsFile)
stage('Build Release APK') {
sh "ls ./android"
sh "./android/gradlew clean assembleRelease"
}
ls output is,(There is not gradlew file)
ls ./android
app
build.gradle
gradle
gradle.properties
key.properties
settings.gradle
This is an error I got
./android/gradlew clean assembleRelease
/Users/donperera/.jenkins/workspace/demo#tmp/durable-b0592b49/script.sh: line 1: ./android/gradlew: No such file or directory
Is there any way to build apk/aap with Jenkins?
Is it possible to use this plugin? but I already added this one. But not in this my script. https://guides.gradle.org/executing-gradle-builds-on-jenkins/

Answer 1

gradlew or gradlew.bat is an executable of Gradle that can be used to execute gradle commands.
gradlew or gradlew.bat uses gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar file for execution.
So there are 3 files in play:
gradlew for mac and linux
gradlew.bat for windows
gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar
The thing here is, these files already exists when you create your flutter project. But these files are ignored by .gitignore of the project by default. so these files won't be available in your CI/CD server.
METHOD 1 [RECOMMENDED]
You don't need them to build your project when it is a flutter project. You need flutter SDK to be installed. You can use flutter SDK to build your project. Use following command for release build [you might need to set flutter SDK for your Jenkins server]:
flutter build apk --release
It will run assembleRelease internally and will generate your APK file.
METHOD 2 [NOT RECOMMENDED]
If you want to do it your way then you can add those 3 files to version control by removing their references from .gitignore file and push it to your repository. Then you'll have those file in your Jenkins workspace. You'll have to grant execution permissions to gradlew if you are on mac or linux which can be done by following command.
chmod +x ./gradlew
then you can use following command to build your app:
./gradlew clean assembleRelease
NOTICE: Method 2 is not recommended because when you run flutter commands, it sets some properties to gradle from pubspec.yaml file like version name, version code. So if you made changes to pubspec.yaml file and haven't run flutter command after that, then running gradlew directly won't include those changes. In this case, your apk might built with older version or might not even built as it reads version info from local.properties file which is auto-modified by flutter commands and it is excluded by default from version control. So, you'll also have to add local.properties file by removing its reference from .gitignore file which is very very dirty because it has location reference of android SDK and your server might not have android SDK on that location. Again you need to tackle that. so don't use this method.

Answer 2

You should not do that "on Jenkins". You should do that in your codebase. Execute the wrapper command (gradle wrapper), add wrapper files to Git, commit and push.