Unable to run aapt command - keeps returning "Android SDK Build-tools"

android

Solution

I'm pretty sure that the Android SDK doesn't try to modify your `PATH` variable for you. If you want to be able to run SDK tools without specifying their full path, you'll need to add the folder(s) containing them to your `PATH` one by one.

You can do this by editing your `~/.bash_profile` and adding a line like so (or editing an existing line like this if you have one already):

export PATH="$PATH:/PATH/TO/android-sdk-macosx/build-tools/17.0.0"

Alternatively, you can just specify the full path to the tool when invoking it, like so:

/PATH/TO/android-sdk-macosx/build-tools/17.0.0/aapt v

I'm not sure this ever happens with `aapt`, but this can be useful to disambiguate if multiple versions of a tool are installed. To see which version of a command that bash is resolving to, you can usually find out by running `which`, like so:

which aapt

EDIT

There have been a number of good comments on this answer including Jared's excellent suggestion to dynamically add the latest build-tools to the path. I reimplemented his code in pure 3.x bash, here's what's currently in my `~/.bash_profile`. First, make sure to set `ANDROID_HOME`:

export ANDROID_HOME="$HOME/Library/Android/sdk" #Set this to the path to your Android SDK if it's not in the default location

Then (if you are using bash):

BUILD_TOOLS=($ANDROID_HOME/build-tools/*)
ANDROID_LATEST_BUILD_TOOLS="${BUILD_TOOLS[@]:(-1)}"
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/bin:$ANDROID_HOME/tools:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools:$ANDROID_LATEST_BUILD_TOOLS"

Alternatively, here is a POSIX version that should work in any shell:

ANDROID_LATEST_BUILD_TOOLS=$(ls -r ${ANDROID_HOME}/build-tools|head -1)
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/bin:$ANDROID_HOME/tools:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools:$ANDROID_HOME/build-tools/$ANDROID_LATEST_BUILD_TOOLS"

Problem

What I'm attempting to do: Install the Android build tools on Mac OSX so I can use the `aapt` command to crunch/process some images for testing What I've done: - Installed the Android SDK using brew - Run the `android` command to bring up the SDK Manager - Used the Manager to install the SDK tools (22.3), SDK Platform-tools(19), SDK Build-tools(19) and Android 4.4 - I've verified that the tools were added to the default location when using brew. What happens: Running `aapt` or `aapt v` always returns `Use the 'android' tool to install the "Android SDK Build-tools".` I've also tried updating the tools using `android update`, but it still fails to work. EDIT: Running the full path to `aapt v` works. I'm now assuming I have an issue with my `PATH` which I still need to resolve Any clues as to what to try next would be greatly appreciated.

Original source