Setup the Android environment

To be able to build an Android project and run automated tests, the Android SDK needs to be installed and configured on the workspace

1. Download the Command Line Tools

From the download page, get the download link for the Linux package by clicking on the package link. It will open a pop-up and by click-right on Download Android Command Line to copy the link

Open a terminal on your workspace, go to your home directory (running cd command will do the trick) and download it with wget <your_link>

At the time of the writing the latest sdk download link is https://dl.google.com/android/repository/commandlinetools-linux-7583922_latest.zip

2. Setup the Android Tools (CLI)

We will create the folder where the Android SDK will be installed and will be your $ANDROID_HOME. On the same workspace terminal : Create a folder AndroidSdk

 ~ $ mkdir AndroidSdk
 ~ $ cd AndroidSdk

Then, unzip the file here. At the time of the writing, the zip file is commandlinetools-linux-7583922_latest.zip. Please replace it with the name of the file you downloaded if it has changed:

unzip ~/commandlinetools-linux-7583922_latest.zip -d ./

You can then remove the zip file:

rm ~/commandlinetools-linux-7583922_latest.zip

Finally, move all the content of the directory cmdline-tools to a created tools directory:

~/AndroidSdk $ cd cmdline-tools
~/AndroidSdk/cmdline-tools $ mkdir tools
~/AndroidSdk/cmdline-tools $ mv -i * tools

If you get an error after running the mv command (“mv: cannot move ‘tools’ to a subdirectory of itself, ‘tools/tools’”), you can ignore it.

3. Add the tools to the $PATH environment variable & set the $ANDROID_HOME environment variable

Adding the tools to the $PATH environment variable will let you call the tools from any location on your terminal. Setting the $ANDROID_HOME environment variable is a prerequisite to run any Android automated tests.

Let’s add those in the your bash_profile. You can use nano for that

Run nano ~/.bash_profile. Add those following lines in the file :

export ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/AndroidSdk
export PATH=$ANDROID_HOME/cmdline-tools/tools/bin/:$PATH
export PATH=$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools/:$PATH

Once finished, save it and source ~/.bash_profile.

Run sdkmanager and hit enter. You should see a progress bar.

4. Installing the Android SDK

This is the final step and your Android environment will be all setup!

For this workshop, we will use an Android project that requires android-29 package - so, we will use this package version.

We will install the minimum required packages which are platform-tools and platforms;android-29:

sdkmanager "platform-tools" "platforms;android-29"

Type y to accept the user conditions.

Your Android environment is now setup!

You can use the command sdkmanager --list to list all the available sdks, platform-tools, etc.