How do I add a library project to Android Studio?

Question

How do I add a library project (such as Sherlock ABS) to Android Studio?

(Not to the old ADT Eclipse-based bundle, but to the new Android Studio.)

Answer 1

I would consider Dependencies, Android Libraries and Multi-project setup necessary reading. Please take a few minutes to do so.

Particularly, in the case of a non-jar library project, read the following snippet from above source:

Gradle projects can also depend on other gradle projects by using a multi-project setup. A multi-project setup usually works by having all the projects as sub folders of a given root project.

For instance, given to following structure:

MyProject/
 + app/
 + libraries/
    + lib1/
    + lib2/

We can identify 3 projects. Gradle will reference them with the following name:

:app
:libraries:lib1
:libraries:lib2

Each projects will have its own build.gradle declaring how it gets built. Additionally, there will be a file called settings.gradle at the root declaring the projects. This gives the following structure:

MyProject/
 | settings.gradle
 + app/
    | build.gradle
 + libraries/
    + lib1/
       | build.gradle
    + lib2/
       | build.gradle

The content of settings.gradle is very simple:

include ':app', ':libraries:lib1', ':libraries:lib2'

This defines which folder is actually a Gradle project.

The :app project is likely to depend on the libraries, and this is done by declaring the following dependencies:

dependencies {
    compile project(':libraries:lib1')
}

Kindly note that there was little or no use of Android Studio GUI to make this happen.

I am currently using git submodules to link the nested library to the actual library git repo to avoid a dependency mess.