This Cordova/Phonegap plugin for Android aligns various versions of the Play Services library specified by other plugins to a specific version.
Table of Contents
TL;DR: To prevent build failures caused by including different versions of the Play Services library.
Some Cordova plugins include the Play Services library to faciliate them. Most commonly, these are now included into the Cordova project by specifying them as Gradle dependencies (see the Cordova plugin spec documenation).
Example plugins:
The problem arises when these plugins specify different versions of the Play Services library. This can cause build failures to occur, which are not easy to resolve without changes by the plugin authors to align the specified versions. See these issues:
To resolve these version collisions, this plugin injects a Gradle configuration file into the native Android platform project, which overrides any versions specified by other plugins, and forces them to the version specified in its Gradle file.
If you're encountering similar problems with the Android Support libraries, checkout the sister plugin: cordova-android-support-gradle-release.
$ cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release
$ cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release --variable PLAY_SERVICES_VERSION={required version}
The plugin needs to be installed with the cordova-fetch mechanism in order to satisfy its package dependencies by installing it via npm.
Therefore if you're installing with cordova@6, you'll need to explicitly specify the --fetch option:
$ cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release --fetch
By default, this plugin will use the major version of the most recent release of the Play Services library - see here for a list recent versions.
$ cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release
In some cases, you may want to specify a different version of the Play Services library.
So this plugin enables you to specify other versions of the Play Services library using the PLAY_SERVICES_VERSION plugin variable.
For example, if you want to install v10 of the Play Services library, you'd specify the version via the variable:
cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release --variable PLAY_SERVICES_VERSION=10.+
Uses v10 of the Play Services library to fix the build issue.
cordova create test1 && cd test1/cordova platform add android@latestcordova plugin add [email protected]cordova compile
Observe the build succeeds and in the console output is v10.2.6 of Play Services library:
:prepareComGoogleAndroidGmsPlayServicesBase1026Library
cordova plugin add [email protected]cordova compile
Observe the build failed and in the console output is higher than v10.2.6 (e.g v11) of Play Services library:
:prepareComGoogleAndroidGmsPlayServicesBase1100Library
cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release --variable PLAY_SERVICES_VERSION=10.+cordova prepare && cordova compile
Observe the build succeeds and in the console output is v10 of Play Services library.
Thanks to Chris Scott, Transistor Software for his idea of extending the initial implementation to support dynamic specification of the library version via a plugin variable in cordova-google-api-version
The MIT License
Copyright (c) 2017 Dave Alden / Working Edge Ltd.
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