Kolibri Android Installer

Wraps Kolibri in an android-compatibility layer. Relies on Python-For-Android to build the APK and for compatibility on the Android platform.

Build on Docker

This project was primarily developed on Docker, so this method is more rigorously tested.

1. Install docker

2. Build or download a Kolibri WHL file, and place in the whl/ directory.

3. Run make run_docker.

4. The generated APK will end up in the bin/ folder.

Building for Development

1. Install the Android SDK and Android NDK.

Run make setup. Follow the instructions from the command to set your environment variables.

2. Install the Python dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Ensure you have all necessary packages for Python for Android.

4. Build or download a Kolibri WHL file, and place it in the whl/ directory.

To download a Kolibri WHL file, you can use make whl=<URL> from the command line. It will download it and put it in the correct directory.

5. By default the APK will be built for most architectures supported by Python for Android. To build for a smaller set of architectures, set the ARCHES environment variable. Run p4a archs to see the available targets.

6. Run make kolibri.apk.unsigned to build the apk. Watch for success at the end, or errors, which might indicate missing build dependencies or build errors. If successful, there should be an APK in the dist/ directory.

Installing the apk

1. Connect your Android device over USB, with USB Debugging enabled.

2. Ensure that adb devices brings up your device. Afterward, run make install to install onto the device.

Running the apk from the terminal

1. Run adb shell am start -n org.learningequality.Kolibri/org.kivy.android.PythonActivity

Debugging the app

Server Side

Run adb logcat -v brief python:D *:F to get all debug logs from the Kolibri server

Client side

1. Start the Kolibri server via Android app
2. Open a browser and see debug logs

• If your device doesn't aggressively kill the server, you can open Chrome and use remote debugging tools to see the logs on your desktop.
• You can also leave the app open and port forward the Android device's Kolibri port using adb:

adb forward tcp:8080 tcp:8081

then going into your desktop's browser and accessing localhost:8081. Note that you can map to any port on the host machine, the second argument.

Alternatively, you can debug the webview directly. Modern Android versions should let you do so from the developer settings.

You could also do so using Weinre. Visit the site to learn how to install and setup. You will have to build a custom Kolibri .whl file that contains the weinre script tag in the base.html file.

Helpful commands

• adb is pretty helpful. Here are some useful uses:
  • adb logcat -b all -c will clear out the device's log. (Docs)
    • Logcat also has a large variety of filtering options. Check out the docs for those.
  • Uninstall from terminal using adb shell pm uninstall org.learningequality.Kolibri. (Docs)
• Docker shouldn't be rebuilding very often, so it shouldn't be using that much storage. But if it does, you can run docker system prune to clear out all "dangling" images, containers, and layers. If you've been constantly rebuilding, it will likely get you several gigabytes of storage.

Docker Implementation Notes

The image was optimized to limit rebuilding and to be run in a developer-centric way. scripts/rundocker.sh describes the options needed to get the build running properly.

Unless you need to make edits to the build method or are debugging one of the build dependencies and would like to continue using docker, you shouldn't need to modify that script.