Solved: No toolchains found in the NDK toolchains folder for ABI with prefix: mips64el-linux-android

If you are trying to compile some already developed code available from github which was bit old and hasn’t been updated recently, there are chances you will see an error as below,

“No toolchains found in the NDK toolchains folder for ABI with prefix: mips64el-linux-android”

This error indicated that you are using some latest version of NDK whereas your source code is bit old and has been configured to use older versions of gradle.

Solution : update your gradle version

If you choose to update by opening project using android studio, then studio may itself automatically upgrade to compatible latest gradle version.

If you choose to update manually using command line editors, you will need to modify build.gradle to upgrade gradle plugin version to latest available (3.5.0), as,

 $ vim build.gradle 

buildscript {
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.5.0'
    }
}

You will also need to update gradle version in gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties by modifying “distributionUrl” to match the compatible gradle plugin version from build.gradle.

$ vim gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties 

distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-5.4.1-all.zip

The latest Plugin Version (from build.gradle) and Gradle Version (from gradle-wrapper.properties ) are available at https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/gradle-plugin#updating-plugin

As mentioned in NDK Changelog

• This version of the NDK is incompatible with the Android Gradle plugin version 3.0 or older. If you see an error like No toolchains found in the NDK toolchains folder for ABI with prefix: mips64el-linux-android, update your project file to use plugin version 3.1 or newer. You will also need to upgrade to Android Studio 3.1 or newer.