How to test and build your Android applications using Gitlab CI

Could be a guest post of the people involved with the Unofficial GitLab client for Android,

https://gitlab.com/u/Michi302 seems to contribute to CE also.

# Notes

• https://gitlab.com/asura/android
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24942751/generating-android-build-with-gitlab-ci
• Make use of artifacts to upload nightly builds of apks
• Dockerfile for Android CI https://gist.github.com/eluleci/f9904382c1496fb81079
• Android development environment for ubuntu precise (12.04 LTS) https://github.com/ahazem/android-dockerfile
• Android apps that could use GitLab CI:
• https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android

Objective

Most people understand the benefits of continuous integration, but setting it up for Android can be a hassle. This article will outline setting up and running tests on an Android Studio project with Gradle on Gitlab's CI

• Learn how to setup an Android build on Gitlab's CI
• Learn how to run UI (Expresso) tests on an emulator

Outline

Setting up the Android Project for testing

• We'll install all of the Android dependancies using this gradle plugin.
• We'll start with this sample project from my repo

Setting up the CI environment.

• Using an Ubuntu runner, similar to the iOS post
• Setup any Android specific stuff.

Get the project to build

• How to save the APK as an artifact (This should probably be after the tests pass right?)

Get the JUnit tests to run

• Pretty straight forward, just a gradle invocation.

Get the UI (Expresso) tests to run.

• This is the tricky part! Getting an emulator running in a CI environment is non-trivial.
• We'll then setup this travis script to start an emulator.

Next Steps (Covered in another post)

• Speed up builds using a precompiled docker image with the build environment
• Publish to Google Play using this gradle plugin