How to put a border around an Android TextView?

With the Material Components Library you can use the MaterialShapeDrawable.

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textview"
        .../>

Then you can programmatically apply a MaterialShapeDrawable:

    TextView textView = findViewById(R.id.textview);
    MaterialShapeDrawable shapeDrawable = new MaterialShapeDrawable();
    shapeDrawable.setFillColor(ContextCompat.getColorStateList(this,android.R.color.transparent));
    shapeDrawable.setStroke(1.0f, ContextCompat.getColor(this,R.color....));
    ViewCompat.setBackground(textView,shapeDrawable);

You can set a shape drawable (a rectangle with corners) as background for the view.

<TextView android:background="@drawable/frame"/>

And rectangle drawable frame.xml (put into res/drawable folder):

<shape
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:shape="rectangle" >
    <solid android:color="@android:color/white" />
    <stroke android:width="1dip"
     android:color="#3d4caf"/>
    <corners android:radius="50dp"/>
</shape>

You can create custom background for your text view. Steps

1. Go to your project.
2. Go to resources and right click to drawable.
3. Click on New -> Drawable Resource File
4. Give name to you file
5. Paste following code in the file

<shape xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <stroke
        android:width="1dp"
        android:color="@color/colorBlack" />
    <padding
        android:bottom="1dp"
        android:left="1dp"
        android:right="1dp"
        android:top="1dp" />
    <corners android:radius="6dp" />
    <solid android:color="#ffffffff" />
</shape>

6. For your text view where you want to use it as backgroud,

   android:background="@drawable/your_fileName"

Changing Konstantin Burov answer because not work in my case:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item>
        <shape android:shape="rectangle">
            <solid android:color="@android:color/white" />
            <stroke android:width="2dip" android:color="#4fa5d5"/>
            <corners android:radius="7dp"/>
        </shape>
    </item>
</selector>

compileSdkVersion 26 (Android 8.0), minSdkVersion 21 (Android 5.0), targetSdkVersion 26, implementation 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:26.1.0', gradle:4.1

Create a border view with the background color as the color of the border and size of your text view. set border view padding as the width of the border. Set text view background color as the color you want for the text view. Now add your text view inside the border view.

Try this:

<shape>
    <solid android:color="@color/txt_white"/>
    <stroke android:width="1dip" android:color="@color/border_black"/>
</shape>

There are a lot of ways to add a border to a textView. The simplest one is by creating a custom drawable and setting it as android:background="@drawable/textview_bg" for your textView.

The textview_bg.xml will go under Drawables and can be something like this. You can have a solid or a gradient background (or nothing if not required), corners to add a corner radius and stroke to add border.

textview_bg.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <shape xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
        android:shape="rectangle">

        <corners
            android:radius="@dimen/dp_10"/>

        <gradient
            android:angle="225"
            android:endColor="#FFFFFF"
            android:startColor="#E0E0E0" />

        <stroke
            android:width="2dp"
            android:color="#000000"/>

    </shape>

  <View
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="2dp"
    android:background="@android:color/black" />

this code enough you can place wherever you want

setBackground on your xml textview,

add rounded_textview.xml file into your drawable directory.

<shape xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:shape="rectangle" >
   <solid android:color="@android:color/white" />
   <stroke android:width="2dip" android:color="#4f5g52"/>
</shape>

set drawable file in textView background.