Setting up a PhoneGap Development Environment

There’s probably already a zillion posts out there about how to set up a PhoneGap development environment on OSX. I wanted my own because I did it once and now I’ve forgotten how. Typical idiot thing to do.

First download the Android Development Tools from here. There are some installation instructions but they basically amount to “run unzip”. This bundle include eclipse and a swack of Androidy stuff. I moved the contents to a Tools directory, because that’s how I roll.

In to that directory I also put the latest version of phone gap. At the time of writing that was 2.6.0.

I added all the tools directories to my PATH in .bash_profile

echoexport PATH=${PATH}:~/Tools/sdk/tools:~/Tools/sdk/platform-tools:~/Tools/phonegap/lib/android/bin

Here if there was a need to do iOS I would replace android in the last part of the path with ios. Or, perhaps it is opposite day and BlackBerry is a popular platform with a strong future then do s/android/blackberry/. But, let’s be honest, if it’s opposite day then I’m a Russian oil billionaire and I’m probably out hunting with Putin.

That’s me, on Putin’s right.

It is kind of a pain that the scripts to create PhoneGap projects are all named the same but just in different directories. If I were making a lot of new apps then probably I would just alias a ton of them instead of adding to my path.

alias create-ios=~/Tools/phonegap/lib/ios/bin/create alias create-android=~/Tools/phonegap/lib/android/bin/create alias create-hahahaha=~/Tools/phonegap/lib/blackberry/bin/create

That’s pretty much it. New projects are created by running the create script and then pointing eclipse at the folder.