Wednesday 25 February 2015

Cordova Build Fails with Exit Code 2 and 8

When building or debugging an Android app using Apache Cordova and Visual Studio, if you encounter this kind of error below:
Could not create the Java Virtual Machine. C:\...\MyApp\EXEC 1 1 MyApp 
A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit. C:\...\MyApp\EXEC 1 1 MyApp 
C:\...\MyApp\bld\Debug\platforms\android\cordova\build.bat: Command failed with exit code 2 C:\...\MyApp\EXEC 1 1 MyApp 
The command ""C:\Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\vs-mda\vs-cli" build --platform "Android" --configuration "Debug" --projectDir . --projectName "MyApp" --language "en-US" --buildServerUrl "" --buildTarget "AndroidDevice"" exited with code 8. C:\Users\Me\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\vs-mda-targets\Microsoft.MDA.targets 99 5 MyApp
You can try to kill Android Debug Bridge process using task manager or command prompt. To do the first way, open Windows Task Manager (ctrl + shift + esc), find adb.exe and then right click and select 'End Process Tree'. Otherwise using command prompt, type adb kill-server and adb start server commands. For example, in my environment:
C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools\adb kill-server
C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools\adb start server
After that, try to build or debug again. If it is still not good then restart Visual Studio.

If you would like to try other ways before restarting Visual Studio, you can try these steps as well:
- close the emulator if you are using emulator
- clean the build files in Visual Studio using 'Clean Solution'
- if still there are files under 'My_App_Name\bld\Debug\platforms' folder then delete those manually
- then try to rebuild or start debugging again

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