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Adding Flipper to Android apps with Gradle

To set up Flipper for Android, you need to add the necessary dependencies to your app, initialize the Flipper client and enable the plugins you want to use. Optionally, you can hook up the diagnostics Activity to help you troubleshoot connection issues.

Dependencies​

Flipper is distributed via Maven Central: add the dependencies to your build.gradle file.

You should also explicitly depend on SoLoader instead of relying on transitive dependency resolution, which is getting deprecated with Gradle 5.

There is a 'no-op' implementation of some oft-used Flipper interfaces, which you can use to make it easier to strip Flipper from your release builds:

repositories {
  mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper:0.273.0'
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.soloader:soloader:0.10.5'

  releaseImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper-noop:0.273.0'
}
danger

The flipper-noop package provides a limited subset of the APIs provided by the flipper package and does not provide any plugin stubs. It's recommended that you keep all Flipper instantiation code in a separate build variant to ensure it doesn't accidentally make it into your production builds.

To see how to organise your Flipper initialization into debug and release variants, check this sample app.

Alternatively, have a look at the third-party flipper-android-no-op repository, which provides empty implementations for several Flipper plugins.

Application setup​

Now you can initialize Flipper in your Application's onCreate method, which involves initializing SoLoader (for loading the C++ part of Flipper) and starting a FlipperClient.

import com.facebook.flipper.android.AndroidFlipperClient
import com.facebook.flipper.android.utils.FlipperUtils
import com.facebook.flipper.core.FlipperClient
import com.facebook.flipper.plugins.inspector.DescriptorMapping
import com.facebook.flipper.plugins.inspector.InspectorFlipperPlugin

class MyApplication : Application {
  override fun onCreate() {
    super.onCreate()
    SoLoader.init(this, false)

    if (BuildConfig.DEBUG && FlipperUtils.shouldEnableFlipper(this)) {
      val client = AndroidFlipperClient.getInstance(this)
      client.addPlugin(InspectorFlipperPlugin(this, DescriptorMapping.withDefaults()))
      client.start()
    }
  }
}

Diagnostics​

It's recommended that you add the following activity to the manifest, which can help diagnose integration issues and other problems:

<activity android:name="com.facebook.flipper.android.diagnostics.FlipperDiagnosticActivity"
        android:exported="true"/>

Android snapshots​

note

Android snapshot releases are published directly off main.

You can get the latest version by adding the Maven Snapshot repository to your sources and pointing to the most recent -SNAPSHOT version.

repositories {
  maven { url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/' }
}

dependencies {
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper:0.273.1-SNAPSHOT'
  debugImplementation 'com.facebook.soloader:soloader:0.10.5'

  releaseImplementation 'com.facebook.flipper:flipper-noop:0.273.1-SNAPSHOT'
}

Enabling plugins​

Finally, you need to add plugins to your Flipper client.

Above, the Layout Inspector plugin has been added to get you started. See the Network Plugin and Layout Inspector Plugin pages for information on how to add them, and also enable Litho or ComponentKit support.

For examples of integrating other plugins, take a look at the sample apps in the GitHub repo.

Issues or questions​

If you encounter any issues or have any questions, refer to the Troubleshooting section.