Android studio external library projects

Question

I'm moving from Eclipse to android studio and this is my set up in eclipse: I have several Android app projects, depending on several library projects (some shared) all within one workspace. In Android studio I first started creating a project per app, but quickly realized that I would have to have the library projects as modules within each project that uses them. This would mean duplicating the library projects and including them in each app, which is highly redundant and would require maintaining multiple copies of the libraries.

So I switched to having all my apps and libraries as modules within the same project. This works for building but creates other problems such as version control issues since each module lives in a separate version control repository.

What is the cleanest way to have this setup? And the real question is, can I have separate projects in AS that share the same external library projects?

Answer 1

With the release of Android Studio 0.5.0, this answer is obsolete, but I'll leave it below for reference. For more up-to-date instructions, see How to share a single library source across multiple projects

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In Android Studio, it's difficult to have shared library projects, because currently it's a limitation that all modules in a project must live under the same root folder; it seems like you found this out when you tried to solve your problem by making one big project that includes everything. We're working on trying to lift this limitation.

The best answer right now is to make the library modules separate projects and have them publish to a local Maven repository, and have the dependent projects pull them in from that repo. This means that you can't work on your app + library module sources from the context of a single project, unfortunately. A bigger disadvantage is that source attachments for those library modules doesn't work yet, so if you're trying to debug your app, you'll have difficulty stepping into code in the libraries.

I know this isn't a very great answer, but at this stage of Android Studio's evolution, it's probably the best we can do. We know yours is a fairly common use case, and it's a priority for us to support it.