The Android/Linux/Docker environment

Hardware ⚓

The current hardware specifications are the following:

at least 7.5GB RAM
at least 2 CPU cores
64 bit CPU
at least 10GB free disk space

Environment ⚓

We use standard Docker images, published on Quay, and the related Dockerfile which you can find on GitHub.

What is a Dockerfile?

The Dockerfile is the description file which describes the docker image / environment and is directly used to build the image.

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

Bitrise Base image (GitHub / Quay) ⚓

image name ID: quay.io/bitriseio/bitrise-base
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 16.04, 64 bit
check out the related Dockerfile where you can see what’s preinstalled in this image

Base Android image (GitHub / Quay) ⚓

image name ID: quay.io/bitriseio/android
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 (GitHub / Quay) ⚓

image name ID: quay.io/bitriseio/android-ndk
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
You can find the pre-installed tools & System Report of this Stack here

Android NDK LTS image (GitHub / Quay) ⚓

image name ID: quay.io/bitriseio/android-ndk-lts
it’s always a tagged version of an older Android NDK image
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
OS: Ubuntu16.04, 64 bit
you can find the pre-installed tools & System Report of this Stack here

Docker & Virtual Machines ⚓

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).

Docker binary installation

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 ⚓

How to run docker in your build and share 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.