I recently worked on a Cordova project and one of the things we found is that it’s an absolute pain to set up a development environment since there is a whole bunch of tools that need to be downloaded and installed and configured in specific ways.

We ended up creating a page in our project’s OneNote notebook with developer setup instructions, but even though we were using Chocolatey it was still a tedious process with numerous console restarts to refresh environment variables (that had to be manually set).

In the process of writing a post on Cordova I wanted to check something and realised I had repaved my machine since the last time I installed the Android SDK / Cordova etc.

I consulted the OneNote page we had created and looked in despair at the instructions. What a PITA! So what did I do?

I spun up a Windows Azure VM and stumbled through creating a PowerShell script to automate the setup. Then I spun up a second VM to check that the script worked :). Then I deleted both of them - probably cost a few cents and the servers had a really fast download speed so the installations were really quick. God I love the cloud :D

I’ve uploaded it to a Gist. If you are setting up a PhoneGap/Cordova & Android development environment then I’m sure it will be useful to you.

Enjoy!