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The Android/Linux/Docker environment

Abstract

Bitrise's Android stacks run on Linux-based virtual machines that are created from Docker images. You can find all the image files on GitHub.

For our Linux-based stacks, we use standard Docker images, published on Quay, and the related Dockerfile which you can find on GitHub (see below).

What is a Dockerfile?

A Dockerfile is a file where you describe the docker image / environment and is directly used to build a Docker image.

Pre-installed tools

All stacks have a large number of pre-installed tools available: Preinstalled tools on Bitrise stacks

Right now we have four docker images, built on top of each other:

Bitrise Base image (Link)

  • Image name ID: quay.io/bitriseio/bitrise-base-20.04.

  • Includes all the non-Android tools and environment setup.

  • Ideal to be used for non-Android projects as a base image, if you want to use it locally too, as this is the smallest image.

  • Ruby, Go, Python, git and the bitrise command line tools are all preinstalled and ready to use.

  • OS: Ubuntu 20.04, 64 bit.

  • Check out the related Dockerfile where you can see what’s preinstalled in this image.

Base Android image (Link)

  • Image name ID: quay.io/bitriseio/android-20.04.

  • Extends the Bitrise Base image with Android-specific tools and environments.

  • Multiple Android SDK, build tool and system image versions are preinstalled, as well as gradle and maven.

  • You can use the $ANDROID_HOME environment variable to point to the location of the pre-installed Android SDK.

  • Check out the related Dockerfile where you can see what’s preinstalled in this image.

Android NDK image (Link)

  • Image name ID: quay.io/bitriseio/android-ndk-20.04.

  • Built on the Base Android image and extends it with the latest Android NDK.

  • You can use the $ANDROID_NDK_HOME environment variable to point to the location of the preinstalled Android NDK, and it’s also added to $PATH.

  • Check out the related Dockerfile where you can see what’s preinstalled in this image.

Every build runs in a new VM, not just in a new container. The VM is destroyed right after the build. This allows us to grant you full control over Docker and the whole environment.

When your build starts on the Docker based Stack, we volume mount the /var/run/docker.sock socket into your container (similar to calling docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock .... You can find a description about this access granting method here).

The docker binary has to be installed inside the base Docker image because docker started to migrate from a single-binary solution to dynamically loaded components, and simply sharing the docker binary is not sufficient anymore.

We install Docker in every one of our Docker images so that you don’t have to do anything if you use our image, or you base your own image on our Docker images.

This means that you have access to docker in your container, and can use other tools which use docker, like docker-compose. You can, for example, configure and run tests and other automations on website projects using docker-compose.

You can call docker info, docker build, docker run, docker login, docker push exactly how you would on your own machine.

Shared volumes

If you want to run docker in your build and share volumes, please note that only those volumes can be shared that are shared with the base docker container (the one your build is running in). This is due to how docker handles volume sharing. Everything under /bitrise can be mounted as a volume, but no other path is guaranteed to work with --volume mapping.

It means that if you use the standard paths and you use relative paths to mount volumes, it’ll work as expected, as the default source code directory is located inside /bitrise (by default it’s /bitrise/src in our Docker images).

What WON’T WORK, however, is if you change the source code directory to be located outside of /bitrise, or you want to mount a folder with an absolute path outside of /bitrise.

In this section: