Android Open Source Project Docker Build Environment

Minimal build environment for AOSP with handy automation wrapper scripts.

Developers can use the Docker image to build directly while running the
distribution of choice, without having to worry about breaking the delicate
AOSP build due to package updates as is sometimes common on bleeding edge
rolling distributions like Arch Linux.

Production build servers and integration test servers should also use the same
Docker image and environment. This eliminates most surprise breakages by
by empowering developers and production builds to use the exact same
environment. The devs will catch the issues with build environment first.

This works well on Linux. Running this via boot2docker (and friends) will
result in a very painful performacne hit due to VirtualBox’s vboxsf shared
folder service which works terrible for very large file shares like AOSP.
It might work, but consider yourself warned. If you’re aware of another way to
get around this, send a pull request!

Quickstart

For the terribly impatient.

1. Make a directory to work and go there.

2. Export the current directory as the persistent file store for the aosp
   wrapper.

3. Run a self contained build script, which does:

   1. Attempts to fetch the aosp wrapper if not found locally.

   2. Runs the aosp wrapper with an extra argument for the docker binary and
      hints to the same script that when run later it’s running in the docker
      container.

   3. The aosp wrapper then does it’s magic which consists of fetching the
      docker image if not found and forms all the necessary docker run
      arguments seamlessly.

   4. The docker container runs the other half the build script which
      initializes the repo, fetches all source code, and builds.

   5. In parallel you are expected to be drinking because I save you some time.

       mkdir nougat ; cd nougat
       export AOSP_VOL=$PWD
       curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kylemanna/docker-aosp/master/tests/build-nougat.sh
       bash ./build-nougat.sh
      

   This takes about 2 hours to download and build on i5-2500k with 100Mb/s network connection.

How it Works

The Dockerfile contains the minimal packages necessary to build Android based
on the main Ubuntu base image.

The aosp wrapper is a simple wrapper to simplify invocation of the Docker
image. The wrapper ensures that a volume mount is accessible and has valid
permissions for the aosp user in the Docker image (this unfortunately
requires sudo). It also forwards an ssh-agent in to the Docker container
so that private git repositories can be accessed if needed.

The intention is to use aosp to prefix all commands one would run in the
Docker container. For example to run repo sync in the Docker container:

aosp repo sync -j2

The aosp wrapper doesn’t work well with setting up environments, but with
some bash magic, this can be side stepped with short little scripts. See
tests/build-nougat.sh for an example of a complete fetch and build of AOSP.

Docker Compose

A Docker Compose file is provided in the root of this repository, you can tweak it as need be:

version: "2"

services:
  aosp:
    image: kylemanna/aosp:latest
    volumes:
      - /tmp/ccache:/ccache
      - ~/aosp:/aosp

Example run: docker-compose run --rm aosp repo sync -j4 – your android build directory will be in ~/aosp.

Issues

There are some known issues with using Docker Toolbox on macOS and current
virtualization technologies resulting in unusual user ID assignments and very
poor performing virtualization file sharing implementations with things like
VirtualBox. It’s recommended to run this image completely in a virtual machine
with enough space to fit the entire build (80GB+) as opposed to mapping the
build to the local macOS file system via VirtualBox or similar.

Tested

• Android Kitkat android-4.4.4_r2.0.1
• Android Lollipop android-5.0.2_r1
• Android Marshmallow android-6.0.1_r80
• Android Nougat android-7.0.0_r14