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GitHub Action - Android Emulator Runner

GitHub Actions status

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 require hardware acceleration (HAXM on Mac & Windows, QEMU on Linux) from the host to run fast. This presents a challenge on CI as to be able to run hardware accelerated emulators within a docker container, KVM must be supported by the host VM which isn't the case for cloud-based CI providers due to infrastructural limits. If you want to learn more about this, here's an article I wrote: Running Android Instrumented Tests on CI.

The macOS VM provided by GitHub Actions has HAXM installed so we are able to create a new AVD instance, launch an emulator with hardware acceleration, and run our Android tests directly on the VM. You can also achieve this on a self-hosted Linux runner, but it will need to be on a compatible instance that allows you to enable KVM - for example AWS EC2 Bare Metal instances.

This action automates the process by doing the following:

  • Install / update the required Android SDK components including build-tools, platform-tools, platform (for the required API level), emulator and system-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

It is recommended to run this action on a macOS VM, e.g. macos-latest, macos-10.15 or macos-11 to take advantage of hardware acceleration support provided by HAXM.

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:

  1. add a gradle/gradle-build-action@v2 step for caching Gradle, more details see #229
  2. add an actions/cache@v3 step for caching the avd
  3. add a reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2 step to generate a clean snapshot - specify emulator-options without no-snapshot
  4. add another reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2 step to run your tests using existing AVD / snapshot - specify emulator-options with no-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 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-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 true Whether to disable hardware acceleration on Linux machines - true or false. Note that this is true by default as Github-hosted Linux runners do not support hardware acceleration.
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.
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

Default emulator-options: -no-window -gpu swiftshader_indirect -no-snapshot -noaudio -no-boot-anim.

Can I use this action on 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. You can get it running much faster on self-hosted Linux runners but only if the underlying instances support KVM (which most don't).

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:

If you are using Android Emulator Runner and want your project included in the list, please feel free to create an issue or open a pull request.