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 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 masOS 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.

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 or macos-10.15 to take advantage of hardware accleration 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@v2

    - 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@v2

    - 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@v2

    - 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

Configurations

	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` or `google_apis`.
`arch`	Optional	`x86`	CPU architecture of the system image - `x86` or `x86_64`. Note that `x86_64` image is only available for API 21+.
`profile`	Optional	N/A	Hardware profile used for creating the AVD - e.g. `Nexus 6`. For a list of all profiles available, run `$ANDROID_HOME/tools/bin/avdmanager list` and refer to the results under "Available Android Virtual Devices".
`avd-name`	Optional	`test`	Custom AVD name used for creating the Android Virtual Device.
`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`.
`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`
`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 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.

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.

Matsue / android-emulator-runner

GitHub Action - Android Emulator Runner

Usage

Configurations

Can I use this action on Linux VMs?

Who is using Android Emulator Runner?

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