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
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.
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: ${{ matrix.target }}
arch: x86_64
profile: Nexus 6
script: ./gradlew connectedCheck
If you need specific versions of NDK and CMake installed:
jobs:
test:
runs-on: macos-latest
steps:
- name: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: run tests
uses: reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
with:
api-level: 29
ndk: 21.0.6113669
cmake: 3.10.2.4988404
script: ./gradlew connectedCheck
We can significantly reduce emulator startup time by setting up AVD snapshot caching:
- add a
gradle/gradle-build-action@v2
step for caching Gradle, more details see #229 - add an
actions/cache@v3
step for caching theavd
- add a
reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
step to generate a clean snapshot - specifyemulator-options
withoutno-snapshot
- add another
reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner@v2
step to run your tests using existing AVD / snapshot - specifyemulator-options
withno-snapshot-save
jobs:
test:
runs-on: macos-latest
strategy:
matrix:
api-level: [21, 23, 29]
steps:
- name: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Gradle cache
uses: gradle/gradle-build-action@v2
- name: AVD cache
uses: actions/cache@v3
id: avd-cache
with:
path: |
~/.android/avd/*
~/.android/adb*
key: avd-${{ 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
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: arm |