Building tea CLI for Termux

Overview

This documents the process of building the tea CLI (official Gitea CLI tool) as a Termux package for aarch64 Android devices.

Prerequisites

• Docker installed with user in docker group
• termux-packages repository cloned
• Android NDK is handled automatically by the Docker builder image

Phase 1 -- Local Build

1. Clone termux-packages

git clone https://github.com/termux/termux-packages

2. Create package directory and build.sh

File: packages/tea/build.sh

Key fields:

Critical notes:

• Do NOT set TERMUX_PKG_DEPENDS= (empty value is parsed as a dependency on an empty string -- caused the first build failure)
• Use termux_setup_golang in termux_step_pre_configure()
• Build with CGO_ENABLED=0 for pure Go compilation

3. Build via Docker

cd termux-packages
bash scripts/run-docker.sh
# Inside container:
./build-package.sh -f -I tea

The -f flag forces rebuild, -I downloads dependencies from Termux repos instead of building them locally.

4. Result

• Output: output/tea_0.14.0_aarch64.deb (6.2MB)
• Install on device: pkg install ./output/tea_0.14.0_aarch64.deb

Phase 2 -- Contribute Upstream

Submitting to termux-packages

1. Fork https://github.com/termux/termux-packages
2. Add packages/tea/build.sh to your fork
3. Create PR with commit message: addpkg(main/tea): add tea CLI for Gitea servers

Packaging Policy Compliance

• MIT licensed
• Active project (233+ stars on Gitea)
• Pure Go (no CGO issues, no native deps)
• Not installable via language-specific package manager
• Package size under 100MB

Known Issues Encountered

1. Empty TERMUX_PKG_DEPENDS -- Setting TERMUX_PKG_DEPENDS= causes parse error: "depends on non-existing package". Fix: omit the line entirely.
2. NDK not installed -- Local build fails without Android NDK. Fix: use Docker builder image instead.
3. SSH sudo -- run-docker.sh requires TERMUX_DOCKER_USE_SUDO=1 unless user has sorted sudo permissions.

Build Time

Approximately 5-15 minutes for first build (downloading Go toolchain, fetching all Go module dependencies, cross-compilation). Subsequent builds are faster due to caching.