How to Not Use Titanium Studio

note: this tutorial describes how to use the original Python build scripts that studio uses. There is a new cli interface for Titanium. Check it out if you’re interested in developing on the command line.

This is a tutorial for those who are frightened by the bloat of Titanium Studio and would rather use the python scripts directly. It would help if you use my tool, tsm, to manage your Titanium SDK versions; however, if you’d rather not, replace the bottom references to

You can install tsm like this:

$ npm i -g tsm

If you’re using tsm – awesome! Grab the latest stable sdk with

$ tsm install 2.0.1

and you’re ready to rock. Most of what you’ll need to do can be accomplished with the titanium.py script, which you can run with the tsm run command. However, we’ll have to use the builder.py script directly for some things which are either not possible or broken with the titanium.py script. Here’s the basics:

iPhone Simulator

$ tsm run 2.0.1 run --platform=iphone

iPad Simulator

This one uses the builder.py script. You’ll have to replace $IOS_VER with the version of simulator to use (such as 4.0), $IOS_ID with your app id, and $APP_NAME with the name of the app.

$ tsm builder 2.0.1 iphone run "`pwd`" $IOS_VER $IOS_ID $APP_NAME ipad

So for example:

$ tsm builder 2.0.1 iphone run "`pwd`" 5.1 com.test.app TestApp ipad

iOS Distribution

For distribution, we need the builder.py script.

$ tsm builder 2.0.1 iphone distribute $IOS_VER "`pwd`" $IOS_ID $APP_NAME $MOBILEPROVISION $DEVIDENT "`pwd`/build/iphone/" universal

This will create an $APP_NAME.app which you can codesign with /usr/bin/xcrun; I described this in a previous post.

Android Emulator

To start the Android emulator, we need the Android builder.py script

$ tsm builder 2.0.1 android emulator $APP_NAME $ANDROID_SDK "`pwd`" $ANDROID_ID "6" $ANDROID_SKIN

“6” is the AVD ID, which identifies this Android device. You’ll see it in the android program which comes with the Android sdk and lists AVDs. $ANDROID_SDK is the path to your sdk. $ANDROID_SKIN is one of the valid skins listed in the android program:

Android FastDev Launching

Before trying to launch you should put

ANDROID_SDK=/path/to/androidsdk/

into your .bashrc.

First, you’ll need to launch the emulator. Then, you can use the titanium.py script to start the fastdev server:

$ tsm run 2.0.1 fastdev start

Now that you’ve started the server, you can launch the app:

$ tsm run 2.0.1 run --platform=android

Cleaning the project

To clean the project you can just touch the tiapp.xml:

$ touch tiapp.xml

Conclusion

Unfortunately the titanium.py script can’t launch the emulator or build iOS distributables. But, in combination with the builder.py scripts you can pretty much completely ignore Titanium Studio.

I recommend using some kindof Makefile (or Cakefile, Jakefile, Rakefile, etc) to manage all of these commands.

Hope this helps.

Published on 25 April 2012
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