Master of android repo mirrors

Sometimes you want to mirror an entire android platform repo, locally, so that you can init & sync to a working directory without being connected to the internet. Handy if your internet connection sucks, or you travel a lot. I'm sure you can use your imagination. Updating means you just have to keep track of a list of mirrors and make sure they are synced in order (for reference chaining).

For AOSP, this task is pretty simple, and the first repository you'll probably mirror:

    popd
    mkdir aosp-mirror
    pushd $_
    repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/mirror/manifest --mirror
    repo sync -j[dl-jobs]

NOTES: $_ in bash is the first argument to the previous command, also dl-jobs is the number of download jobs. popd is the directory we started in. If say, I were on my Mac10.8 and made a case-sensitive sparse disk, and: mkdir /Volumes/Android/mirrors && cd /Volumes/Android/mirrors/ then popd will just return the current directory, as current working directory is the only item on the stack. We pushd to aosp-mirror, init and sync.

Go outside and do something. This will probably take a while.

For CyanogenMod, it's a little bit more difficult. There is no mirror/manifest for CyanogenMod, so we have to do that part ourselves:

    popd
    mkdir cyanogenmod-mirror
    pushd $_
    git ls-remote -h git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android.git > CM-$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).xml
    for branch in $(awk 'BEGIN { FS = "/" } ; { print $3 }' $(ls -t1 CM-*.xml | head -n1)); do \
        repo init -u git://github.com/CyanogenMod/android.git -b ${branch} --mirror --reference /Volumes/Android/aosp-mirror; \
        mv .repo .repo-${branch}; \
        ln -sf .repo-${branch} .repo; \
        repo sync -j4; \
        rm .repo; \
    done

Notice a pattern? {pre,post}-{init,sync}? Yes! pre-init we get a list of branches, post-init we move .repo to be specific for the current branch, and post-sync we remove the symbolic link to the current branch's .repo. The rest is the same, except this repo mirror references the aosp-mirror.

That's pretty much it for now. You can now go up a directory from your aosp-mirror and cyanogenmod-mirror directories (probably in /Volumes/Android/ if you followed my directions) and sync a local working directory:

    cd /Volumes/Android/mirrors/cyanogenmod-mirror/
    ln -sf .repo-cm10.1 .repo
    mkdir -p /Volumes/Android/work/cm-10.1
    cd $_
    repo init -u file:///Volumes/Android/mirrors/cyanogenmod-mirror/ -b cm-10.1
    repo sync

This could be done for a number of other aosp-based android platform repository mirrors.

I'm starting with this post on a series of disconnected android platform development on Mac OS X. It should work on Linux, and Windows/Cygwin/mingw(not tested!)... whatever you use on windows.

I will be working on tutorials for setting up mirror management (soon a tool for doing this, repo-mm on my github account), setting up eclipse for development, and eventually some tips and tricks.

Stay tuned!