Getting Appcelerator Titanium for free: the OSS version

Important note: since May 2, 2017, Axway (proprietary of Appcelerator) decided to give again for free the Indie account so, two years later, all the people can join Appcelerator Titanium for free again. Nevertheless, this article is still relevant if you want to work without the need of join to Appcelerator indies limitations (login to the platform, share a project) and you don’t need features like Hyperloop (access to native APIs) or Studio.

Although is not very known, there is an OSS (Open Source Software) version of well known Appcelerator Titanium ecosystem. Or, at least, you can have the needed tools and SDKs to do all the work, as in the old times (with free Titanium Studio, that currently doesn’t exist/work).

What? Appcelerator Titanium is not free as it was years ago? Exactly, as any enterprise they can’t offer their tools for free and pay their developers at the same time forever. So the step to paid services was done 18 months ago (approx.), and now the minimum plan is an Indie account for 36$/month that allows you to use Appcelerator Studio IDE, latest GA SDKs and another private advanced tools (not really needed to develop an app).

But, fortunately, Titanium born as an open source initiative and they respected it, so there is a parallel project/website: http://www.appcelerator.org/

This site, basically, gives some info and redirects you to the GitHub repo, where we can read this interesting sentence that finish in a link to download pre-built Titanium SDKs:

Titanium is licensed under the OSI approved Apache Public License (version 2). Please see the LICENSE file for specific details.

Download Pre-built Titanium

In that page you can find the latest Titanium SDKs in continuous integration which means you can get some fixes not existing in GA version (final stable and tested version) and maybe also some errors not yet tested. But, it is a source where you can get a compiled and legal SDK for your Ti OSS. Will go over this later.

Installing

Ok, so there is an OSS version of Titanium so, how can I get it?

First of all, you need Node in your system in order to get all working, so check if Node is installed ($ node -v in your command line) and, in case not, install it.

After it, you can install Titanium CLI (command line interface) + Alloy + a great tool from David Bankier, TiSDK, which allows you to download or compile latest GA SDKs from Appcelerator:

$ npm install -g titanium alloy tisdk

We are now ready to install Titanium SDK, the last step to be able to build mobile apps.

List the available GA SDKs, choose one and install it

$ tisdk list
5.4.0.GA
5.3.1.GA
5.3.0.GA
5.2.2.GA
5.2.1.GA
5.2.0.GA
5.1.2.GA
5.1.1.GA
5.1.0.GA
5.0.2.GA
5.0.1.GA
5.0.0.GA
4.1.1.GA
4.1.0.GA
4.0.0.GA
3.5.1.GA
3.5.0.GA

At this point, note this: officially, the latest compiled and free online version (at current day) is 4.1.1.GA. This means that upper versions must be built on your system. So you have two options here:

$ tisdk install 4.1.1.GA

This will download & install directly the SDK in your system or, if you need a greater version:

$ tisdk build 5.5.1.GA

Depending on your system (Windows, Mac, Linux, Node version…) this will fail or will work (there are some issues open in tisdk repo related to this). For example, in my Win 7 computer this process fails with a fatal: cannot create directory blah blah… filename too long error.

Alternatively, you can:

• Build it manually as explained in Titanium GitHub (you will need Android NDK installed to do it).
• Use and old SDK GA (currently up to 4.1.1.GA)
• Use the continuous buildings from http://builds.appcelerator.com/ (it, probably, will work better than GA but as you probably now, they are not that safe). You can try this option with command (note ti, not tisdk)

$ ti sdk install --branch 6_0_X

(will install the latest build from the nightly builds of version 6, not the latest GA).

NOTE: as Flavio commented, you can download a specific GA version if you know the right name:

http://builds.appcelerator.com/mobile-releases/[SDK_BRANCH]/mobilesdk-[SDK_VER.GA]-[OS_NAME].zip

where OS_NAME = osx|win32|linux

For example, you can directly get from your browser the 5.5.1.GA version, just writing this url:

http://builds.appcelerator.com/mobile-releases/5.5.1/mobilesdk-5.5.1.GA-win32.zip 

Nevertheless, I’m not sure if this is legal if you don’t have at least an indie account. Anyway, there is the way to download it manually.

And where is the IDE

Well, Titanium Studio was discontinued in favor of Appcelerator Studio (paid account), but don’t worry: Atom and all it’s power is here and it is even better than Studio (quickly, lighter, extensible).

Atom

You can follow the great tutorial by Miga on how to install and configure Atom with specific Titanium modules to do all what Studio does and even more.

m1ga/titanium_with_atom

And what about Liveview

Oh yes, the wonderful Liveview. Previous to Liveview existing, Titanium users had another wonderful tool by David Bankier: TiShadow.

You can use TiShadow instead Liveview to do exactly the same, but TiShadow is more powerful. If you want to extract all the TiShadow capabilities, you need a complex configuration (follow his own guide), but if you only want to test in your current device, you can always use the flag -- shadow when building your project, and all happens magically.

dbankier/TiShadow

Another option to do the same (for iOS only) is the tool Faster Titanium.

I have all but, where is the button to build, as in Studio?

Ops, we still don’t have a button in Atom for this but… using CLI is not so complicated. Install a terminal tool for Atom, open it and use the basic CLI commands to build your project

$ ti build

Also, to be more productive, config aliases for typical CLI commands so you can write only a few letter to launch big and complex commands.

For example, those are the commands to publish to Android and iOS stores:

$ ti build -p android -T dist-playstore -K /dev/keys/mykeys -L my_alias -O /dev/my_app/
$ ti build -p ios -T dist-appstore -R <DISTRIBUTION_CERTIFICATE_NAME> -P <PROVISIONING_PROFILE_UUID>

Again, follow the Miga’s tutorial to achieve it.

Congratulations, now you are able to work on a great IDE with Titanium and build apps for free.