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Setup Guide

The app is built with Gradle and can be compiled on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Development is typically done with the latest stable release of Android Studio.

Tip: On macOS and Linux, Gradle is invoked with ./gradlew. On Windows, Gradle is invoked with gradlew. Throughout the documentation, the macOS and Linux syntax is used by default.

Tip: You do NOT need to install Gradle yourself. Running it from the command line or building the application within Android Studio will download the necessary dependencies automatically.

Step by Step

To get set up for development, there are several steps that you need to go through. Going through these steps in order is important, as each step in the progression builds on the prior steps. These steps are written assuming a fresh development environment.

Start by making sure the command line with Gradle works first, because all the Android Studio run configurations use Gradle internally. The run configurations are not magic—they map directly to command line invocations with different arguments.

  1. Install Java
    1. Install JVM 17 or greater on your system. Our setup has been tested with Java 17. Although a variety of JVM distributions are available and should work, we have settled on recommending Adoptium/Temurin, because this is the default distribution used by Gradle toolchains. For Windows or Linux, be sure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable points to the right Java version. Note: If you switch from a newer to an older JVM version, you may see an error like the following > com.android.ide.common.signing.KeytoolException: Failed to read key AndroidDebugKey from store "~/.android/debug.keystore": Integrity check failed: java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException: Algorithm HmacPBESHA256 not available. A solution is to delete the debug keystore and allow it to be re-generated.
    2. Android Studio has an embedded JVM, although running Gradle tasks from the command line requires a separate JVM to be installed. Our Gradle scripts are configured to use toolchains to automatically install the correct JVM version.
  2. Install Android Studio and the Android SDK

    1. Download Android Studio. As of September 2022, we recommend Android Studio Electric Eel preview because it is more robust with Kotlin Multiplatform. Also note that due to issue #420 Intel-based machines may have trouble building in Android Studio. If you experience this, the workaround is to add the following line to ~/.gradle/gradle.properties ZCASH_IS_DEPENDENCY_LOCKING_ENABLED=false.

    2. During the Android Studio setup wizard, choose the "Standard" setup option

    3. Note the file path where Android Studio will install the Android developer tools, as you will need this path later

    4. Continue and let Android Studio download and install the rest of the Android developer tools

    5. Do not open the project in Android Studio yet. That happens in a subsequent step below. At this stage, we're just using Android Studio to install the Android SDK.

    6. Configure ANDROID_HOME environment variable using the path noted above. This will allow easily running Android development commands, like adb logcat or adb install myapp.apk

      1. macOS

        1. Add the following to ~/.zprofile

          export ANDROID_HOME=THE_PATH_NOTED_ABOVE
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANDROID_HOME}/tools
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANDROID_HOME}/tools/bin
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANDROID_HOME}/platform-tools

    7. Configure a device for development and testing

      1. Android virtual device
        1. Inside Android Studio, the small More Actions button has an option to open the Virtual Device Manager
        2. When configuring an Android Virtual Device (AVD), choose an Android version that is within the range of our min and target SDK versions, defined in gradle.properties.
      2. Physical Android device
        1. Enable developer mode
          1. Go into the Android settings
          2. Go to About phone
          3. Tap on the build number seven times (some devices hide this under "Software information")
          4. Go back and navigate to the newly enabled Developer options. This may be a top-level item or under System > Developer options
          5. Enable USB debugging
          6. Connect your device to your computer, granting permission to the USB MAC address
  3. Check out the code. Use the command line (instead of Android Studio) to check out the code. This will ensure that your command line environment is set up correctly and avoids a few pitfalls with trying to use Android Studio directly. Android Studio's built-in git client is not as robust as standalone clients
    1. To check out a git repo from GitHub, there are three authentication methods: SSH, HTTPS, and GitHub API. We recommend SSH.
    2. Create a new SSH key, following GitHub's instructions
    3. Add the SSH key under GitHub account settings
    4. Clone repo in a terminal on your computer git clone git@github.com:Electric-Coin-Company/zashi-android.git
  4. Compile from the command line
    1. Navigate to the repo checkout in a terminal
    2. Compile the application with the gradle command ./gradlew assemble
  5. Compile from Android Studio
    1. Open Android Studio
    2. From within Android Studio, choose to open an existing project and navigate to the root of the checked out repo. Point Android Studio to the root of the git repo as (do not point it to the app module, as that is just a subset of the project and cannot be opened by itself)
      1. Note: When first opening the project, Android Studio will warn that Gradle checksums are not fully supported. Choose the "Use checksum" option. This is a security feature that we have explicitly enabled.
      2. Shortly after opening the project, Android Studio may prompt about updating the Android Gradle Plugin. DO NOT DO THIS. If you do so, the build will fail because the project also has dependency locking enabled as a security feature. To learn more, see Build integrity.md
      3. Android Studio may prompt about updating the Kotlin plugin. Do this. Our application often uses a newer version of Kotlin than is bundled with Android Studio.
    3. After Android Studio finishes syncing with Gradle, select which build variant you'd like your built app to have. From the top menu bar, select Build -> Select Built Variant and then choose from variants of Mainnet or Testnet (for more information see section Build variants below). After build variant selection, look for the green "play" run button in the toolbar. To the left of it, choose the "app" run configuration under the dropdown menu. Then hit the run button

Troubleshooting

  1. Verify that the Git repo has not been modified. Due to strict dependency locking (for security reasons), the build will fail unless the locks are also updated
  2. Try running from the command line instead of Android Studio, to rule out Android Studio issues. If it works from the command line, try this step to reset Android Studio
    1. Quit Android Studio
    2. Delete the invisible .idea in the root directory of the project. This directory is partially ignored by Git, so deleting it will remove the files that are untracked
    3. Restore the missing files in .idea folder from Git
    4. Relaunch Android Studio
  3. Clean the individual Gradle project by running ./gradlew clean which will purge local build outputs.
  4. Run Gradle with the argument --rerun-tasks which will effectively disable the build cache by re-running tasks and repopulating the cache. E.g. ./gradlew assemble --rerun-tasks
  5. Reboot your computer, which will ensure that Gradle and Kotlin daemons are completely killed and relaunched
  6. Delete the global Gradle cache under ~/.gradle/caches
  7. If adding a new dependency or updating a dependency, a warning that a dependency cannot be found may indicate the Maven repository restrictions need adjusting
  8. If included build (like buildSrc) contains different kotlin version (embedded from gradle) than other modules then Android Studio will not use gradle wrapper version specified in project. Running configurations or using terminal works as expected. link

Gradle Tasks

A variety of Gradle tasks are set up within the project, and these tasks are also accessible in Android Studio as run configurations.

  • assemble - Compiles the application but does not deploy it
  • assembleAndroidTest - Compiles the application and tests, but does not deploy the application or run the tests. The Android Studio run configuration actually runs all of these tasks because the debug APKs are necessary to run the tests: assembleDebug assembleZcashmainnetDebug assembleZcashtestnetDebug assembleAndroidTest
  • check - Runs tests of Kotlin-only modules
  • connectedCheck - Runs tests of Android-only modules on any running Android virtual device or connected physical Android device
  • detektAll - Performs static analysis with Detekt
  • ktlintFormat - Performs code formatting checks with ktlint
  • lint - Performs static analysis with Android lint
  • dependencyUpdates - Checks for available dependency updates. It will only suggest final releases, unless a particular dependency is already using a non-final release (e.g. alpha, beta, RC).

A few notes on running instrumentation tests on the ui-screenshot-test module:

  • Screenshots are generated automatically and copied to /ui-screenshot-test/build/output
  • Running the Android tests on the ui-screenshot-test module will erase the data stored by the app. This is because Test Orchestrator is required to reset app state to successfully perform integration tests.

Gradle Managed Devices are also configured with our build scripts. We have found best results running tests one module at a time, rather than trying to run them all at once. For example: ./gradlew :ui-lib:pixel2TargetDebugAndroidTest will run the UI tests on a Pixel 2 sized device using our target API version.

Gradle Properties

A variety of Gradle properties can be used to configure the build. Most of these properties are optional and help with advanced configuration. If you're just doing local development or making a small pull request contribution, you likely do not need to worry about these.

Debug Signing

By default, the application is signed by the developers automatically generated debug signing key. In a team of developers, it may be advantageous to share a debug key so that debug builds can access key-restricted services such as Firebase or Google Maps. For such a setup, the path to a shared debug signing key can be set with the property ZCASH_DEBUG_KEYSTORE_PATH.

Release Signing

This section is optional.

To enable release signing, a release keystore needs to be provided during the build. This can be injected securely by setting the following Gradle properties.

  • ZCASH_RELEASE_KEYSTORE_PATH
  • ZCASH_RELEASE_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD
  • ZCASH_RELEASE_KEY_ALIAS
  • ZCASH_RELEASE_KEY_ALIAS_PASSWORD

On a developer machine, these might be set under the user's global properties (e.g. ~/.gradle/gradle.properties on macOS and Linux). On a continuous integration machine, these can also be set using environment variables with the prefix ORG_GRADLE_PROJECT_ (e.g. ORG_GRADLE_PROJECT_ZCASH_RELEASE_KEYSTORE_PATH). DO NOT set these in the gradle.properties inside the Git repository, as this will leak your keystore password.

Build variants

Android apps can have build types (debug, release), build flavors (mainnet, testnet), and their combination gives us build variants.

Debug builds are up to 10x slower due to JIT being disabled by Android's runtime, so they should not be used for benchmarks. Debug builds also have logging enabled. By convention, debug builds have a different package name, which means that both a release build from Google Play and a debug build for development can be installed simultaneously. Another difference is that release builds are processed with R8, which performs "tree shaking" to reduce the size of the final app by stripping unused code and performing code-level optimizations. This tree shaking process means that release builds have a mapping.txt file that helps reconstruct stacktraces (e.g. crashes).

"mainnet" (main network) and "testnet" (test network) are terms used in the blockchain ecosystem to describe different blockchain networks. Mainnet is responsible for executing actual transactions within the network and storing them on the blockchain. In contrast, the testnet provides an alternative environment that mimics the mainnet's functionality to allow developers to build and test projects without needing to facilitate live transactions or the use of cryptocurrencies, for example.

Currently, we support 4 build variants for the app module: zcashmainnetDebug, zcashtestnetDebug, zcashmainnetRelease, zcashtestnetRelease. Library modules like ui-lib, test-lib, etc. support only debug and release variants. UI test modules like ui-integration-test, ui-screenshot-test provide variants extended by the network dimension similarly as app module does. Moreover, the ui-benchmark-test introduces a benchmark build type, which is supposed to be used only for benchmarking.

App module build variants:

  • zcashtestnetDebug - build variant is built upon testnet network and with debug build type. You usually use this variant for development
  • zcashmainnetDebug - same as previous, but is built upon mainnet network
  • zcashmainnetRelease and zcashtestnetRelease - are usually used by our CI jobs to prepare binaries for testing and releasing to the Google Play Store

Included builds

This section is optional.

To simplify implementation of Zcash SDK or BIP-39 features in conjunction with changes to the app, a Gradle Included Build can be configured.

  1. Check out the SDK
  2. Verify that the zcash-android-wallet-sdk builds correctly on its own (e.g. ./gradlew assemble)
  3. In the secant-android-wallet repo, modify property SDK_INCLUDED_BUILD_PATH to be the absolute path to the zcash-android-wallet-sdk checkout. (You can also use a relative path, but it will be relative to the root of secant-android-wallet). A similar property also exists for BIP-39 BIP_39_INCLUDED_BUILD_PATH
  4. Build secant-android-wallet

There are some limitations of included builds:

  1. If secant-android-wallet is using a newer version of the Android Gradle plugin compared to zcash-android-wallet-sdk, the build will fail. If this happens, you may need to modify the zcash-android-wallet-sdk gradle.properties so that the Android Gradle Plugin version matches that of secant-android-wallet. After making this change, it will be necessary to run a build from the command line with the flag --write-locks e.g. ./gradlew assemble --write-locks in order to update the dependency locks. Similar problems can occur if projects are using different versions of Kotlin or different versions of Gradle
  2. Modules in each project cannot share the same name. For this reason, build-conventions have different names in each repo (zcash-android-wallet-sdk/build-conventions vs secant-android-wallet/build-conventions-secant)

Firebase Test Lab

This section is optional.

For Continuous Integration, see CI.md. The rest of this section is regarding local development.

  1. Configure or request access to a Firebase Test Lab project
    1. If you are an Electric Coin Co team member: Make an IT request to add your Google account to the existing Firebase Test Lab project
    2. If you are an open source contributor: set up your own Firebase project for the purpose of running Firebase Test Lab
  2. Set the Firebase Google Cloud project name as a global Gradle property ZCASH_FIREBASE_TEST_LAB_PROJECT under ~/.gradle/gradle.properties
  3. Run the Gradle task flankAuth to generate a Firebase authentication token on your machine

Tests can now be run on Firebase Test Lab from your local machine.

The Firebase Test Lab tasks DO NOT build the app, so they rely on existing build outputs. This means you should:

  1. Build the debug and test APKs: ./gradlew assembleDebug assembleZcashmainnetDebug assembleZcashtestnetDebug assembleAndroidTest
  2. Run the tests: ./gradlew runFlank

Emulator WTF

This section is optional.

For Continuous Integration, see CI.md. The rest of this section is regarding local development.

  1. Configure or request access to emulator.wtf
    1. If you are an Electric Coin Co team member: We are still setting up a process for this, because emulator.wtf does not yet support individual API tokens
    2. If you are an open source contributor: Visit http://emulator.wtf and request an API key
  2. Set the emulator.wtf API key as a global Gradle property ZCASH_EMULATOR_WTF_API_KEY under ~/.gradle/gradle.properties
  3. Run the Gradle task ./gradlew testDebugWithEmulatorWtf :app:testZcashmainnetDebugWithEmulatorWtf :ui-integration-test:testDebugWithEmulatorWtf :ui-screenshot-test:testDebugWithEmulatorWtf (emulator.wtf tasks do build the app, so you don't need to build them beforehand)

Testnet funds

The Zcash testnet is an alternative blockchain that attempts to mimic the mainnet (main Zcash network) for testing purposes. Testnet coins are distinct from actual ZEC and do not have value. Developers and users can experiment with the testnet without having to use valuable currency. The testnet is also used to test network upgrades and their activation before committing to the upgrade on the main Zcash network. For more information on how to add testnet funds visit Testnet Guide or go right to the Testnet Faucet.

Sideloading

Although the goal of this document is to enable readers to build the app from source, it is also possible to sideload debug builds created by Continuous Integration. For more details see Sideloading.md.