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alpine-android

Deprecation Warning

This image has been deprecated and no updates (or support) may be available in future. Even though it is a container, it may or may not keep working as expected, use at your own risk.

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Container for Alpine Linux + OpenJDK8 + Android + NodeJS + Cordova

This image containerizes the Android command-line tools, along with Gradle and OpenJDK-8 for building native apps, as well as Cordova for building hybrid projects, with its NPM dependencies.

Based on Alpine Linux from the openjdk8 image with the android-toolkit and cordova packages installed in it.

Get the Image

Pull the image from Docker Hub.

docker pull woahbase/alpine-android
Image Tags

The image is tagged respectively for the following architectures,

latest tag is retagged from x86_64, so pulling without any tag fetches you that image. For any other architectures specify the tag for that architecture. e.g. for armv8 or aarch64 host it is alpine-android:aarch64.

Run

Run the container to get a user-scoped shell,

docker run --rm -it \
  --name docker_android \
  -c 512 -m 3072m \
  -v $PWD:/home/alpine/project \
woahbase/alpine-android:x86_64
Configuration

  • Mount the project directory (where build.gradle or package.json is) at /home/alpine/project. Mounts PWD by default.

  • Builds run under the user alpine.

  • Optionally, if you want to cache the jars/packages downloaded by gradle, so that they're downloaded once, and reused in later builds, bind mount the user home directory (/home/alpine) somewhere in your local. The packages get cached inside the /home/alpine/.gradle folder.

Common Recipes

The usual android stuff. e.g

Build developer APK from a project with 

docker run --rm -it \
  --name docker_android \
  -c 512 -m 1024m \
  -v $PWD:/home/alpine/project \
woahbase/alpine-android:x86_64 \
  -ec "gradle assembleDebug"

For Cordova projects, you can build a project with 

docker run --rm -it \
  --name docker_android \
  -c 512 -m 3072m \
  -v $PWD:/home/alpine/project \
woahbase/alpine-android:x86_64 \
  -ec "npm install && npm run <your build target>"

Build Your Own

Feel free to clone (or fork) the repository and customize it for your own usage, build the image for yourself on your own systems, and optionally, push it to your own public (or private) repository.

Here's how...

Setting up

Before we clone the /repository, we must have Git, GNU make, and Docker (optionally, with buildx plugin for multi-platform images) setup on the machine. Also, for multi-platform annotations, we might require enabling experimental features of Docker.

Now, to get the code,

Clone the repository with,

git clone https://github.com/woahbase/alpine-android
cd alpine-android
Always Check Before You Make!

Did you know, we could check what any make target is going to execute before we actually run them, with

make -n <targetname> <optional args>

Build and Test

To create the image for your architecture, run the build and test target with

make build test

For building an image that targets another architecture, it is required to specify the ARCH parameter when building. e.g.

make build test ARCH=x86_64

Make to Run

Running the image creates a container and either starts a service (for service images) or provides a shell (can be either a root-shell or usershell) to execute commands in, depending on the image. We can run the image with

make run

But if we just need a root-shell in the container without any fance pre-tasks (e.g. for debug or to test something bespoke), we can run bash in the container with --entrypoint /bin/bash. This is wrapped in the makefile as

make shell
Nothing vs All vs Run vs Shell

By default, if make is run without any arguments, it calls the target all. In our case this is usually mapped to the target run (which in turn may be mapped to shell).

There may be more such targets defined as per the usage of the image. Check the makefile for more information.

Push the Image

If the build and test steps finish without any error, and we want to use the image on other machines, it is the next step push the image we built to a container image repository (like /hub), for that, run the push target with

make push

If the built image targets another architecture then it is required to specify the ARCH parameter when pushing. e.g.

make push ARCH=x86_64

That's all folks! Happy containerizing!

Maintenance

Sources at Github. Images at Docker Hub.

Maintained (or sometimes a lack thereof?) by WOAHBase.

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