Circle Mate 0.0.3 Mac OS
The Android Emulator, unfortunately, doesn’t work in CircleCI’s conventional (Docker-based) Android build environment. With a little tinkering, though, we can make it work in another environment!
What Doesn’t Work
Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system. Download and install Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo.
Reach the white circle to advance to the next part of the level. Press the arrow keys to move the rock. Gain momentum by rolling up and down along the walls and jump over the rocks that are in your way. Jun 25, 2020 Nope, flat out not interested, despite there being at the time millions of Mac users still not running OS X, and all the OS X users also using Classic, with nothing running in Classic able to use.
Since CircleCI 2.0, the recommended build environment for most projects is the Docker Executor. Overall, it’s great: Docker images are fast, portable, and cacheable. Chances are you can start with a prebuilt one.
One of the jobs in our current workflow boots up the circleci/android:api-29-node image in about four seconds with all the build tools we need. For building and publishing, this is fantastic.
Unfortunately, when you begin configuring your tests, you’ll soon realize that this environment can’t run the Emulator.
Circle Mate 0.0.3 Mac Os Pro
Why?
To achieve reasonable performance, the Android Emulator needshardware acceleration, which depends on supporting capabilities from the processor and operating system. We can use the Emulator’s -accel-check flag to interrogate a system’s compatibility. Here’s what it says in a CircleCI Docker environment:
(That means “no.”)
But wait! Docker is but one of several executors available on CircleCI. What if we use a conventional Linux VM instead of Docker? (This is called the machine executor).
That doesn’t work either. Bummer.
At this point, you might heed CircleCI’s advice and pursue a third-party service like Firebase Test Lab or AWS Device Farm, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
What Works
We were already using CircleCI’s MacOS support to build and test our React Native app for iOS. I had one last wacky idea to try: could we run the Android Emulator on MacOS?
It works!
Configuration
Without the convenience of an externally-maintained Docker image, it’s on you to install the Android tools. If you want to try Android testing on MacOS, hopefully our configuration can save you some time:
Circle Mate 0.0.3 Mac Os Download
And here’s install-android-tools.sh:
Conclusion
It’s unorthodox, but this approach has worked reasonably well so far for our small React Native project. One set of Appium tests can run against both iOS and Android, and they run the same way in CircleCI that they do locally.
I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with Android UI tests in CircleCI, whether via a third-party service, a CI host that supports the Emulator, or another approach altogether.