The Android NDK is a toolset that lets you implement parts of your app in native code, using languages such as C and C++. For certain types of apps, this can help you reuse code libraries written in those languages.
To install and configure the NDK, follow these steps:
$ mkdir ~/Android
$ cd ~/Android
Download android ndk Linux 64 bit from http://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/index.html , when we written this post, the latest Android version is R23B, which we downloaded and copied to /home/myuser/Android directory. Now, Lets extract this zip as,
$ unzip android-ndk-r23b-linux.zip
This will extract as “Extracting android-ndk-r23b” into folder “android-ndk-r23b” in ~/Android directory. When uncompressed, the NDK files are contained in a directory called android-ndk-<version>
. You can rename the NDK directory if necessary and you can move it to any location on your computer.
Export the NDK path into environment variables,
$ export PATH=$PATH:/home/myuser/Android/android-ndk-r23b
OR You can also edit your ~/.bashrc file and append above line to add NDK permanently to your path to avoid typing above command always.
Check if ndk-build is added to environment,
$ which ndk-build
/home/myuser/Android/android-ndk-r23b/ndk-build
Sometimes, you may need to set NDK_HOME evnvironment variable which you can do the same way as above,
$ export NDK_HOME=/home/myuser/Android/android-ndk-r23b