Unrecognized option: --illegal-access=permit when running cordova build android

Question

I'm running an ionic project and I'm getting the following errors when I run ionic cordova build android :

Unrecognized option: --illegal-access=permit
Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.

This happened immediately I updated my ionic version and reinstalled JDK 8.My search online makes me understand it seems to be a very recent issue with recent versions of cordova-android and no resource I found helped solve the problem.

Answer 1

Go to the path your project /platforms/android/

Edit the gradlew file

Look at the end of the file in the line eval set - $ DEFAULT_JVM_OPTS and remove --illegal-access = permit

Recompile and issue resolved

Answer 2

I ran into this problem on a machine that turned out to have an old version of Gradle installed (4.x). After installing current Gradle (7.2 as of this writing), and removing and re-adding Android to the Cordova project, I was able to build successfully.

Answer 3

This has to do with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) version. The --illegal-access=permit option is not present int the Java 8 JVM. The Java 11 JVM, for example, does support it.

I ran into this today when running gradle init to create a gradle wrapper in my repository. gradle init itself was successful, but the resulting gradle wrapper sets that --illegal-access=permit , which caused any ./gradlew commands I ran to fail.

So it seems that the default gradle init task assumes that you'll be using a newer JDK version.