Android Emulator Fleet

Run this action to create remote GPU-accelerated Android emulators in Limbar Cloud so that you can run all your automated UI tests in parallel saving you a lot of time. Just like the big clouds, you are never charged for concurrency - get as many instances as you need and pay only for what you use.

Example usage

The following step will create a new Android emulator instance in the default organization and region, and connect to it. Once it's available, which usually takes less than a second, you can start all the mobile testing automation tools you have, like maestro, Appium, Behave and the rest.

Once the GitHub workflow completes, a post-action step will clean up the instance.

- name: Run Android
  uses: limbario/run-android@v0.4.7
  with:
    token: ${{ secrets.LIM_TOKEN }}

- name: Run tests
  run: ./gradlew connectedCheck --stacktrace

Go to Limbar Console and watch while your tests are executed.

How it works

What this action does is run the following as many as the count times as count parameter is given:

lim run android --stream=false

Then in the next steps, you can use all the commands that work with Android:

# See the list of connected devices.
adb devices

# Install your app.
adb install apk/pr-debug.apk

Tools such as maestro, Appium and Behave also recognize the Android emulator instances and can run tests on them.

While the tests are executing, you can watch the Android emulator screens live by going to Limbar Console and get the lim connect command to stream the screen to your desktop live like the following:

lim connect android 5oe2g0ut40

✓ Checking your token 📜
✓ Fetching instance information
✓ Tunnel is ready for adb at localhost:65040 🚇
⠧ Ready to control the device 🕹️

See more details in the Limbar documentation.

Testing with 20 Android Emulators in Parallel

In Limbar, you can have as many remote Android emulator instances as you need without additional cost to quickly finish all the tests your app has. A count parameter is provided to utilize this so that you don't have to have a separate GitHub Actions job for every Android emulator instance.

The following GitHub Actions steps does the following:

• Provision 20 Android Emulator instances at once,
• Install your app's APK file to all of them,
• Run maestro with --shard-split=20 flag so that it utilizes all 20 of the Android emulator instances in parallel.

Increase the count as many as your UI tests so that you can iterate on the results quickly and save great amount of time.

- name: Run Android
  uses: limbario/run-android@v0.4.7
  with:
    token: ${{ secrets.LIM_TOKEN }}
    count: 20

- name: Install APK in parallel
  run: |
    #!/bin/bash
    # Get all connected devices
    devices=$(adb devices | grep -v "List" | grep "localhost" | cut -f1)
    # Install APK on each device in parallel
    for device in $devices; do
        (
            echo "Installing on device: $device"
            adb -s $device install apk/pr-debug.apk
        ) &
    done
    # Wait for all parallel installations to complete
    wait
    echo "Installation completed on all devices"

- name: Run Tests in parallel
  run: |
    maestro test .maestro --shard-split=20

You can watch the Android emulator screens while the tests are ongoing by going to Limbar Console and get the lim connect command to stream the screen to your desktop live.

Inputs

token

Required The token to use to authenticate with Limbar.

You can get this token in Limbar Console.

organization-id

Optional The organization to create the Android instance in. If not given, the default organization from the token is used.

You can get this ID in Limbar Console but organization tokens already contain it, so in most cases, you don't need to supply this.

region

Optional The region to create the Android instance in. The closest one is chosen if not given.

See Limbar Console for a list of regions or run lim regions.