Experimental Vagrant setup to install a minimal Linux VM with the Android SDK, Android Studio, and adb debugging over USB. Designed to work on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Before you begin, you will need to download the following applications:

• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

Navigate to the directory where you cloned this repository and run vagrant up. This will kick off a fairly lengthy process that downloads and installs the following:

• 64-bit Ubuntu VM
• Xubuntu Desktop
• Docker

Once this process completes, you should run vagrant halt to shut down the VM. This shutdown is only required the first time you provision the VM.

Run vagrant up. You should see a VirtualBox window with a login prompt. Select the "vagrant" user and enter the password "vagrant" when prompted.

From your host machine, run vagrant ssh inside the android-vagrant directory. This will connect you to the VM. You could also press Ctrl+Alt+t inside the VM to bring up a Terminal, but using ssh on the host machine has performance benefits.

So far the VM doesn't do anything interesting! This is because all of the real functionality is in docker containers. The next section describes how to run the container you want.

There are a few docker images described in the android-vagrant/docker folder:

• samtstern/android-sdk - contains Java, the Android SDK, and all of the extras and tools (Google Play Services, adb, aapt, etc.)
• samtstern/android-studio - based on samtstern/android-sdk that contains Android Studio and allows you to run Android Studio graphically in the vagrant VM.

To build a docker image, run one of the build_docker_*_.sh scripts in the /vagrant/scripts folder.

To run a docker image that you built, run sh run_docker.sh $CONTAINER_NAME $CMD, replacing $CONTAINER_NAME with the name of the container to run, and $CMD (optional) with a command to run. Example:

# Run `adb devices` in the base android image
run_docker.sh "samtstern/android-sdk" "adb devices"

# Run the android studio image
run_docker.sh "samtstern/android-studio"

Note: the images are hosted on docker hub, so samtstern/android-studio can be built without first building samtstern/android-sdk, however due to network performance issues in VirtualBox it is usually faster to build the samtstern/android-sdk image locally and then build the samtstern/android-studio image.

Connect your Android device to your computer using a USB cable. Make sure you have enabled USB debugging on your device. From the VM menu, select Devices > USB Devices > [your device]. This will connect your device to the VM over USB. Run adb devices to confirm that it is connected.

If you accept the debugging dialog on your phone, then your device's status will change from unauthorized to device and you are ready for debugging.

If you have problems connecting with adb, run:

sudo /Android/Sdk/platform-tools/adb kill-server && \
sudo /Android/Sdk/platform-tools/adb start-server && \
adb devices

to restart the adb server.

The /vagrant directory (don't confuse this with /home/vagrant, which is $HOME) in the VM is synchronized with the directory containing the Vagrantfile on your host machine. If you create Android Studio projects in the VM's /vagrant directory, they will be synchronized to your host machine for later editing/sharing. Any files written in other directories will be stored only on the VM and will not be available from the host machine.

Note: Docker images do not persist files between runs, unless the file is mapped to an external, persistent directory. The run_docker.sh script maps the /vagrant directory inside the container to the VM (and the VM maps it to the host machine), so save all code in that directory.

If you made it this far you have probably been at your computer a while watching dependencies download, SDKs build, packages install, dockers dock, etc. If you never want to have to do that again, even on another machine, you can import/export the current state of your VM using the management/import.sh and management/export.sh scripts. Run these from the root folder of the repository (probably android-vagrant).

management/export.sh will create archive/package.box which is a Vagrant box containing the exact current state of your virtual machine, plus the contents of the docker and scripts directories. management/import.sh $NAME will import archive/package.box as $NAME and then run vagrant init $NAME to create a new Vagrant VM from the archive.