Crashlytics NDK How to Enable native symbol uploading - firebase

Question

I am tring to enable crashlytics for my NDK android app. Ive followed the the guide here. I got stuck on Step 2.
Step 2: Enable native symbol uploading To produce readable stack:
traces from NDK crashes, Crashlytics needs to know about the symbols
in your native binaries. Our Gradle plugin includes the
uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileBUILD_VARIANT task to automate this process
(to access this task, make sure nativeSymbolUploadEnabled is set to
true).
For method names to appear in your stack traces, you must explicitly
invoke the uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileBUILD_VARIANT task after each
build of your NDK library. For example:
>./gradlew app:assembleBUILD_VARIANT\
app:uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileBUILD_VARIANT
What does For method names to appear in your stack traces, you must explicitly invoke the uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileBUILD_VARIANT task after each build of your NDK library.mean? I also saw that they left a line with gradlew. Is this a command on a command line? I am very lost. Can anyone help me achieve step 2?

Answer 1

I was also at a lost, but finally understand.
This command should be like this.
At first, move to the directory
cd /YourProjectRootPath/proj.android/
You can find gradlew file in this directory.
Then execute gradlew to run two tasks.
Task1: assembleDebug or assembleRelease
Task2: uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileDebug or uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileRelease
the command is, (Example of debug)
./gradlew XXXXXX:assembleDebug XXXXXX:uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileDebug
Please replace "XXXXXX" to your "app name".
If you don't know what is your app name, please run the command below.
./gradlew tasks --all
You can see all task names and can find these two tasks.
XXXXXX:assembleDebug
XXXXXX:uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileDebug
This "XXXXXX" is your "app name".
I don't know why Google describes such a complicated command using ">" and "\", but it's just a simple command,
./gradlew <TASK1> <TASK2>

Answer 2

When you add "nativeSymbolUploadEnabled true" to your gradle file like mentioned in Step1 this will instruct the gradle plugin to generate a new task with the format "uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileBUILD_VARIANT" for each build type and architectures. Check this screenshot where I only have one build type "release" but also have three architectures. The tasks generated are:
uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileArm8Release
uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileUniversalRelease
uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileX86_64Release
To run these tasks, you will need to either execute the command in a terminal updated for the desired build variant, e.g.
>./gradlew app:assembleX86_64\
app:uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileX86_64Release
Or manually calling those tasks in the gradle tab. They need to be executed in this order (first the assemble and then the uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFile...) to make sure the binaries have been created for Crashlytics to generate and upload the symbol files.
To answer your question: What does For method names to appear in your stack traces, you must explicitly invoke the uploadCrashlyticsSymbolFileBUILD_VARIANT task after each build of your NDK library.mean? Crashlytics will need the symbol files in order to convert the crash report into a readable stack trace with method names and line numbers.