Building a Crosswalk application

Crosswalk is a runtime for HTML5 applications. This means that existing HTML5 applications should run with Crosswalk. Follow any of the options below to create and package a web application.

Use an existing web application project
Create a sample project using crosswalk-app create <package id>
Manually create a very simple web project

Use an existing web application

If you already have an existing project, you need only add an icon and a manifest.json file.

See step 3.2 below for a description of the manifest.

After adding the icon(s) and manifest, You can proceed to build your application.

Create a sample project using crosswalk-app

The crosswalk-app tool can create a starting template for your application:

> crosswalk-app create <package id>

package-id is the 3-part Internet-domain name for your package, such as com.abc.myappname. For details on the format, see the Android package documentation.

The command above will create a project with the following structure:

Once created, you can proceed to build your application.

Manually create a very simple web project

For the purposes of this tutorial, we use the simplest possible Crosswalk application: one HTML file.

First, create a directory called xwalk-simple for the project:
```
> mkdir xwalk-simple/
> cd xwalk-simple/
```
Next, copy an icon file to that directory, to serve as the application icon. You can use this image:

To use this example, right click on the image and select Save Image As... (or its equivalent in your browser). Save it into the xwalk-simple directory as icon.png. (Note that this image is from the Crosswalk source code and is BSD licensed.)

If you have your own favourite icon, copy that to the xwalk-simple directory instead. It should be 128 pixels square.

Create two text files inside xwalk-simple (create them using any text editor, e.g. Notepad on Windows, gedit on Ubuntu):

index.html

This is a single HTML file which represents the user interface for the application. For the purposes of this tutorial, we are not using any CSS or JavaScript.

The content should be:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
   <head>
     <meta name="viewport"
           content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
     <meta charset="utf-8">
     <title>Crosswalk Simple</title>
   </head>
   <body>
     <p>Hello World! Crosswalk is great.</p>
   </body>
</html>

manifest.json

This contains the application metadata (see above). The minimum manifest.json required to build is:

{
   "name": "Crosswalk Simple",
   "xwalk_app_version": "0.1",
   "start_url": "index.html",
   "xwalk_package_id": "com.xwalk.simple",
   "icons": [
     {
         "src": "icon.png",
         "sizes": "72x72"
     }
   ]
}

See the manifest documentation for more information.

Build the application

Once your application is ready, with an icon and manifest.json file, it is ready to be packaged with Crosswalk.

> crosswalk-pkg <folder with manifest.json>

This command downloads and imports Crosswalk and creates a package using the files in the path. By default, it will create debug, embedded, 32-bit APKs for both x86 and ARM architectures (recommended). 64-bit APKs can also be created. For options, see the "Usage" section of the Crosswalk-app-tools page, or view the help:

> crosswalk-pkg help

You are now ready to run the application on a target.