Due to this change, obviously (removal of the gradle object)
https://github.com/NativeScript/android-runtime/pull/1705/files#diff-7ae45ad102eab3b6d7e7896acd08c427a9b25b346470d7bc6507b6481575d519

Please install nativescript@next (it's due to be published later today)

npm i -g nativescript@next

we just found that there is a merged PR for nativescript-cli NativeScript/nativescript-cli#5614 which fixes this, but no 8.2.0 CLI release which includes this PR.

@rigor789 thanks. This impacts our CI builds so we'll need to create new images which takes some time. I'm thinking of building a patched version just for the sake of getting our builds stable.

@lambourn you could pin @nativescript/android version to 8.1.5 I guess - and bump to 8.2.0 once you have your CI setup updated?

@rigor789 I would - but there is no published @nativescript/android version 8.1.5

Sorry, I meant 8.1.1 - the previous stable version

@rigor789 well, this is what we actually use as a pinned version, @nativescript/android@8.1.1

I just locally patched the nativescript/lib/services/android-plugin-build-service.js of the 8.1.4 CLI and added the missing bit and am able to build now.

// this was missing after line 433 in https://github.com/NativeScript/nativescript-cli/blob/1fc3893e5bff66816d195d28aeafa01f2649ba5d/lib/services/android-plugin-build-service.ts
runtimeGradleVersions = await this.getGradleVersions(projectRuntimeVersion);

I re-tagged 8.1.1 as latest on npm - that should probably solve the issue... We might need to add back that gradle key for backwards compatibility - and phase it out later.

Added the gradle key back in 8.2.1 - It's not actually being used as far as I can tell - but we'll need to look around and phase it out in a future release.

NativeScript/android@af925d5

@rigor789 thanks for the prompt resolution. I gave it a try: at least for us this does not resolve the issue.

The 8.1.4 CLI now gets the values from the android 8.2.1 package.json which is expected Iif I got you right:

Got gradle versions null from runtime v8.1.1
Exec npm view @nativescript/android  dist-tags --json 
 stdout: {
  "rc": "8.2.0-rc.0",
  "latest": "8.2.1",
  "alpha": "8.2.0-alpha.11"
}
 
 stderr: 
Exec npm view @nativescript/android@8.2.1  gradle --json 
 stdout: {
  "version": "7.4",
  "android": "7.1.2"
}
 
 stderr: 
Got gradle versions {"gradleVersion":"7.4","gradleAndroidPluginVersion":"7.1.2"} from the latest runtime v8.2.1

and as a result the CLI downloads G7 which in the end leads to build failures as some of our custom code and 3rd party plugins is not yet G7 compatible.

In the end this boils down to the missing line in android-plugin-build-service.ts which does not prefer the Gradle version of the locally used @nativescript/android version I posted above.

We'll have to stay with {N} 8.1.4/5 for now, so local patching of the CLI is the only option for us.

Just looked a bit more into this - cli 8.2 should definitely fix this for older projects too (it's backwards compatible, so should be safe to upgrade the CLI whenever you can). I also just prepared a PR that changes the behavior slightly - to always try reading from the local runtime package.json before going to npm view - this should be hit 99.9% of the time (I guess?) and save some time by not going out to the npm registry. NativeScript/nativescript-cli#5646

Hey @rigor789 - nice, sounds great 🤘