Sign Releases with Cordova Android - Cordova 5

The Cordova CLI for Cordova 5 Phonegap  tutorial

Introduction: Adobe PhoneGap© says that it takes the pain off developing mobile apps! Android developers seemed to take heed of that as well as ios developers. And windows mobile app makers too. The biggies on deciding how to make an app have chosen Phonegap as the app creator. But the constant software development and revisions take a heavy toll on developers time and on documentation! 

As iLee.co.uk does not revise what is to be done for Gradle and Cordova 5, here it is for our developer colleagues revised as on 28 August 2015

Since the Cordova 5 was introduced about a few months ago, building and deploying Cordova apps for development has become different to say the least. E.g. for Android:

$ cordova build android

$ cordova run android

As before if you want to build a release version of an APK from the command line for production. Use command below however, this does not sign your release:

$ cordova build android --release

 To release a signed apk to Android with Cordova 5, first a keystore file must be created as usual.

$ keytool -genkey -v -keystore <"Name of Application">.keystore -alias <"Your Alias"> -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

Enter the keystore password and continue entering in all the rest of the prompted information

Copy this newly created key store created whichever folder you are in, into the platform/android directory.

Release in CLI workflow

Use this below to hooks directly into the cordova build android --release command.

Cordova 5 (might have been 4 as well) uses Gradle to compile now, so the old ant.properties no longer works. 

You can work the same trick by creating a release-signing.properties file in platforms/android and adding the following fill with your file name and other information:

storeFile=
storeType=jks
keyAlias=
// optional :
keyPassword=
storePassword=

Also It works with Java 7 no issues, no certificate signing issues. 

And finally give the command 

cordova build android --release 

and you get a signed zip aligned apk to be sent to the Google play store. 

Its is found in /platforms/android/build/outputs/apk/ folder

Happy developing!

Thanks Adobe and Apache Cordova

Get more value from your mobile app strategy

Do you need to show a real ROI on mobile apps? You can better build, integrate, and manage existing or new apps at scale with IBM MobileFirst Platform, Salesforce or just plain vanilla Phonegap Build  a.k.a. Apache Cordova (this is but open source software development initiative)  app builders. IBM says " Think rapid development, continuous improvement, security and personalization. With a single point of integration for enterprise, device, and cloud data – using any (or all) of the cloud services you need."

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