I use homebrew and brew-bundler to manage all my dependencies. If you are curious how check out my osx dotfiles.

A lot of things had changed since I last setup an android development environment and nearly every blog or stackoverflow or personal note had stale information.

This is how I got up and running, with consideration to the following changes:

• Android SDK is now installed via Cask
• SDK location changed with homebrew install
• The sdk manager and avd manager have new binaries
• The manager binaries have new CLI’s
• Android Studio has become a standard

Node dependencies (installed 8.1.2):

brew install node
brew install yarn
yarn global add n
n latest

Android dependencies:

brew install ant
brew install maven
brew install gradle
brew cask install android-sdk
brew cask install android-ndk
brew cask install intel-haxm
brew cask install android-platform-tools
brew cask install android-studio

React-native dependencies.

yarn global add react-native-cli
yarn global add rnpm
yarn global add babel-cli

Add the following to .bash_profile

export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/usr/local/share/android-sdk
export ANDROID_NDK_HOME=/usr/local/share/android-ndk
export ANDROID_HOME=/usr/local/share/android-sdk
export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/opt/ant
export MAVEN_HOME=/usr/local/opt/maven
export GRADLE_HOME=/usr/local/opt/gradle
export PATH=$ANT_HOME/bin:$PATH
export PATH=$MAVEN_HOME/bin:$PATH
export PATH=$GRADLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
export PATH=$ANDROID_HOME/tools:$PATH
export PATH=$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools:$PATH

After this I started up android studio, and set the path to the android SDK to the proper location.

Now you use the Android Studio SDK Manager to install all SDK’s your project needs. Some may choose to use the sdkmanager and avdmanager binaries directly but I think the GUI is easier.

When running react-native run-android I was presented the following error:

Error watching file for changes: EMFILE
{"code":"EMFILE","errno":"EMFILE","syscall":"Error watching file for changes:","filename":null}
Error: Error watching file for changes: EMFILE

I found this Github issue on the react-native repo and resolved it with brew install watchman.

I hope this helps someone else setup their android and react-native development environment with homebrew.