GitHub Action - Android Emulator Runner
A GitHub Action for installing, configuring and running hardware-accelerated Android Emulators on macOS virtual machines.
The old ARM-based emulators were slow and are no longer supported by Google. The modern Intel Atom (x86 and x86_64) emulators can be fast, but rely on two forms of hardware acceleration to reach their peak potential: Graphics Acceleration, e.g. emulator -gpu host
and Virtual Machine(VM) Acceleration, e.g. emulator -accel on
. Note: GPU and VM Acceleration are two different and non-mutually exclusive forms of Hardware Acceleration.
This presents a challenge when running emulators on CI especially when running emulators within a docker container, because Nested Virtualization must be supported by the host VM which isn't the case for most cloud-based CI providers due to infrastructural limits. If you want to learn more about Emulators on CI, here's an article Yang wrote: Running Android Instrumented Tests on CI.
A note on VM Acceleration and why we don't need HAXM anymore
According to this documentation, "on Mac OS X v10.10 Yosemite and higher, the Android Emulator uses the built-in Hypervisor.Framework by default, and falls back to using Intel HAXM if Hypervisor.Framework fails to initialize." This means that HAXM is only needed to achieve VM Acceleration if this default Hypervisor is not available on macOS machines.
Note: Manually enabling and downloading HAXM is not recommended because it is redundant and not needed (see above), and for users of macOS 10.13 High Sierra and higher: macOS 10.13 disables installation of kernel extensions by default. Because Intel HAXM is a kernel extension, we would need to manually enable its installation on the base runner VM. Furthermore, manually trying to install HAXM on a Github Runner brings up a popup which further hinders tests from running.
Purpose
This action helps automate and configure the process of setting up an emulator and running your tests by doing the following:
- Install / update the required Android SDK components including
build-tools
,platform-tools
,platform
(for the required API level),emulator
andsystem-images
(for the required API level). - Create a new instance of AVD with the provided configurations.
- Launch a new Emulator with the provided configurations.
- Wait until the Emulator is booted and ready for use.
- Run a custom script provided by user once the Emulator is up and running - e.g.
./gradlew connectedCheck
. - Kill the Emulator and finish the action.
Usage & Examples
A workflow that uses android-emulator-runner to run your instrumented tests on API 29:
jobs:
test:
runs-on: macos-latest
steps:
- name: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: run tests
uses: reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
with:
api-level: 29
script: ./gradlew connectedCheck
We can also leverage GitHub Actions's build matrix to test across multiple configurations:
jobs:
test:
runs-on: macos-latest
strategy:
matrix:
api-level: [21, 23, 29]
target: [default, google_apis]
steps:
- name: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: run tests
uses: reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
with:
api-level: ${{ matrix.api-level }}
target: ${{ matrix.target }}
arch: x86_64
profile: Nexus 6
script: ./gradlew connectedCheck
If you need specific versions of NDK and CMake installed:
jobs:
test:
runs-on: macos-latest
steps:
- name: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: run tests
uses: reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
with:
api-level: 29
ndk: 21.0.6113669
cmake: 3.10.2.4988404
script: ./gradlew connectedCheck
We can significantly reduce emulator startup time by setting up AVD snapshot caching:
- add a
gradle/gradle-build-action@v2
step for caching Gradle, more details see #229 - add an
actions/cache@v3
step for caching theavd
- add a
reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
step to generate a clean snapshot - specifyemulator-options
withoutno-snapshot
- add another
reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
step to run your tests using existing AVD / snapshot - specifyemulator-options
withno-snapshot-save
jobs:
test:
runs-on: macos-latest
strategy:
matrix:
api-level: [21, 23, 29]
steps:
- name: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Gradle cache
uses: gradle/gradle-build-action@v2
- name: AVD cache
uses: actions/cache@v3
id: avd-cache
with:
path: |
~/.android/avd/*
~/.android/adb*
key: avd-${{ matrix.api-level }}
- name: create AVD and generate snapshot for caching
if: steps.avd-cache.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
uses: reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
with:
api-level: ${{ matrix.api-level }}
force-avd-creation: false
emulator-options: -no-window -gpu swiftshader_indirect -noaudio -no-boot-anim -camera-back none
disable-animations: false
script: echo "Generated AVD snapshot for caching."
- name: run tests
uses: reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
with:
api-level: ${{ matrix.api-level }}
force-avd-creation: false
emulator-options: -no-snapshot-save -no-window -gpu swiftshader_indirect -noaudio -no-boot-anim -camera-back none
disable-animations: true
script: ./gradlew connectedCheck
Configurations
Input | Required | Default | Description |
---|---|---|---|
api-level |
Required | N/A | API level of the platform system image - e.g. 23 for Android Marshmallow, 29 for Android 10. Minimum API level supported is 15. |
target |
Optional | default |
Target of the system image - default , google_apis , playstore , android-wear , android-wear-cn , android-tv , google-tv , aosp_atd or google_atd . Note that aosp_atd and google_atd currently require the following: api-level: 30 , arch: x86 or arch: arm64-v8 and channel: canary . |
arch |
Optional | x86 |
CPU architecture of the system image - x86 , x86_64 or arm64-v8a . Note that x86_64 image is only available for API 21+. arm64-v8a images require Android 4.2+ and are limited to fewer API levels (e.g. 30). |
profile |
Optional | N/A | Hardware profile used for creating the AVD - e.g. Nexus 6 . For a list of all profiles available, run avdmanager list device . |
cores |
Optional | 2 | Number of cores to use for the emulator (hw.cpu.ncore in config.ini). |
ram-size |
Optional | N/A | Size of RAM to use for this AVD, in KB or MB, denoted with K or M. - e.g. 2048M |
heap-size |
Optional | N/A | Heap size to use for this AVD, in KB or MB, denoted with K or M. - e.g. 512M |
sdcard-path-or-size |
Optional | N/A | Path to the SD card image for this AVD or the size of a new SD card image to create for this AVD, in KB or MB, denoted with K or M. - e.g. path/to/sdcard , or 1000M . |
disk-size |
Optional | N/A | Disk size, or partition size to use for this AVD. Either in bytes or KB, MB or GB, when denoted with K, M or G. - e.g. 2048M |
avd-name |
Optional | test |
Custom AVD name used for creating the Android Virtual Device. |
force-avd-creation |
Optional | true |
Whether to force create the AVD by overwriting an existing AVD with the same name as avd-name - true or false . |
emulator-boot-timeout |
Optional | 600 |
Emulator boot timeout in seconds. If it takes longer to boot, the action would fail - e.g. 300 for 5 minutes. |
emulator-options |
Optional | See below | Command-line options used when launching the emulator (replacing all default options) - e.g. -no-window -no-snapshot -camera-back emulated . |
disable-animations |
Optional | true |
Whether to disable animations - true or false . |
disable-spellchecker |
Optional | false |
Whether to disable spellchecker - true or false . |
disable-linux-hw-accel |
Optional | auto |
Whether to disable hardware acceleration on Linux machines - true , false or auto . |
enable-hw-keyboard |
Optional | false |
Whether to enable hardware keyboard - true or false . |
emulator-build |
Optional | N/A | Build number of a specific version of the emulator binary to use e.g. 6061023 for emulator v29.3.0.0. |
working-directory |
Optional | ./ |
A custom working directory - e.g. ./android if your root Gradle project is under the ./android sub-directory within your repository. Will be used for script & pre-emulator-launch-script . |
ndk |
Optional | N/A | Version of NDK to install - e.g. 21.0.6113669 |
cmake |
Optional | N/A | Version of CMake to install - e.g. 3.10.2.4988404 |
channel |
Optional | stable | Channel to download the SDK components from - stable , beta , dev , canary |
script |
Required | N/A | Custom script to run - e.g. to run Android instrumented tests on the emulator: ./gradlew connectedCheck |
pre-emulator-launch-script |
Optional | N/A | Custom script to run after creating the AVD and before launching the emulator - e.g. ./adjust-emulator-configs.sh |
Default emulator-options
: -no-window -gpu swiftshader_indirect -no-snapshot -noaudio -no-boot-anim
.
Can I use this action on Github Hosted Linux VMs?
The short answer is yes but on Github-hosted Linux runners it's expected to be a much worse experience (on some newer API levels it might not work at all) than running it on macOS, because of the current lack of hardware acceleration support. You can get it running much faster on self-hosted Linux runners but only if the underlying instances support KVM (which most don't). Things might be better on the newer Larger runners but they are still in Beta. It is possible to use this Action with hardware accelerated Linux VMs hosted by a third-party runner provider.
For a longer answer please refer to this issue.
Who is using Android Emulator Runner?
These are some of the open-source projects using (or used) Android Emulator Runner:
- coil-kt/coil
- cashapp/sqldelight
- square/workflow-kotlin
- square/retrofit
- natario1/CameraView
- natario1/Transcoder
- chrisbanes/insetter
- slackhq/keeper
- android/compose-samples
- ReactiveCircus/streamlined
- ReactiveCircus/FlowBinding
- JakeWharton/RxBinding
- vinaygaba/Learn-Jetpack-Compose-By-Example
- ashishb/adb-enhanced
- vgaidarji/ci-matters
- simpledotorg/simple-android
- cashapp/copper
- square/radiography
- Shopify/android-testify
- square/leakcanary
- hash-checker/hash-checker
- hash-checker/hash-checker-lite
- Kiwix/kiwix-android
- wikimedia/apps-android-wikipedia
- google/android-fhir
- google/accompanist
- dotanuki-labs/norris
- tinylog-org/tinylog
- hzi-braunschweig/SORMAS-Project
- ACRA/acra
- bitfireAT/davx5-ose
If you are using Android Emulator Runner and want your project included in the list, please feel free to open a pull request.