Hi everybody, I just got started with Appium development and I’m having a hard time to setup an Appium development environment in a virtual machine. I’m unable to launch a device in the AVD manager from the Android SDK and had problems with connecting physical devices to my VM too.
I’m no longer sure if it’s a good idea to use VMs for Appium development. Any advice would be appreciated.
I have an Appium instance running inside a Fedora 22 Linux VirtualBox VM. I can run tests on physical devices through the VM, but I needed to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel module, followed by specifying some device filters in the VM settings to connect physical devices on USB to the VM.
I have not tried Android emulators, because my host machine would probably come to a crawl trying to run an emulator in an emulator.
Are you using VirtualBox? Did you remember to install the guest additions kernel module? If your host machine is a Linux box, I think you have to add the user running VirtualBox to the “vboxusers” group.
Sorry, I should have been more specific about my environment. I’m using Windows 7 Enterprise inside a VMware VM. My host is Windows 7 Enterprise. Maybe you are right about running emulators inside emulators. The thing is that I’m currently just evaluating things and I’m trying to avoid loading all kind of software on my work machine. I have a full Visual Studio/SQL Server setup on my host that I need for daily work and I don’t want to put this environment at risk.
For some reason I couldn’t connect my Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE to the virtual machine. I have installed the USB driver inside the VM, but it is still not recognized.
Ah, in that case, I’m afraid I can’t give much help. I don’t have any knowledge of what VMWare’s VMs require to communicate with physical devices. Someone else probably has a better idea about what to do here.