Support Custom System Images

[destinyb-realityi]

I was wondering if there is / will be support for emulators running custom system images? For example, if I had gotten the system image directly from a manufacturer it would be awesome to be able to use this to test my application(s) on the device without actually needing the hardware.

It would also be really useful for rooted images as well.

[ychescale9]

Sorry I'm not familiar with custom system images. A few questions:

• How would that workflow work? do you need any custom tooling for launching an emulator created with the custom image?
• How would you use avdmanager to create a new android virtual device from the custom image?
• Do you have any samples / scripts for automating this process?

[destinyb-realityi]

Thanks for getting back so quickly! To my understanding, as long as you have a "system.img" file in your AVD directory, the AVD will launch using the custom image automatically. See here for more information.

I unfortunately don't have any samples or scripts for automating the process. I'm very early into my research of seeing how to do this.

I do imagine though if you created a custom_image field in the yml configuration, and we pass a directory in our repo where it's located, you could copy the file into the directory our AVD is created.

Thoughts?

[ychescale9]

That seems easy enough on my end. Again I'm not familiar with custom ROM, so if you managed to get this to work locally let me know so I can look at how to best integrate the process into the action.

If we were to add this support I'd like to test this with a sample image on CI. Would you put the custom image in the repository or some cloud storage?

[destinyb-realityi]

Sorry for the late reply! Been doing some research. I'm not entirely sure how to get the "system.img" so I reached out to one of our device manufacturers to see if we can get it from them.

Another question; would we possibly be able to have this action use our own AVDs?
For example, if we use the script to download a custom AVD from AWS S3, can we pass into the script to use a custom AVD at a specific location?

[ychescale9]

Sounds possible but we’ll have to try.

…

On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 at 1:46 am, destinyb-realityi ***@***.***> wrote: Sorry for the late reply! Been doing some research. I'm not entirely sure how to get the "system.img" so I reached out to one of our device manufacturers to see if we can get it from them. Another question; would we possibly be able to have this action use our own AVDs? For example, if we use the script to download a custom AVD from S3, can we pass into the script to use a custom AVD at a specific location? — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#29?email_source=notifications&email_token=ACX4IYFF3H7T7YQBVPIHZ2DRGUFMXA5CNFSM4LCY6BX2YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOEOHQTEI#issuecomment-596576657>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACX4IYDVQ673BC5XO2KULFTRGUFMXANCNFSM4LCY6BXQ> .

[mrk-han]

Wouldn't it be possible to create the emulator, download the .avd then manually drop it into the .avd folder?

Could be an interesting PR, provide path to custom system image. Marking as help wanted