Get apk file from server for remote appium testing

Support
1

Hi.
I have remote appium server and i wan to start my tests from the other machine. How I can do it?
How i need set capability of my apk?
I read in the documentation, that i can set the URL on my app, but it does’t work - i have the “bad app path”.
Can somebody help me?

Mikhail,
Best regards.

2

Hey, all. Sorry about bumping this topic, but I was thinking whether to bump an old topic or start a new topic for exactly the same problem. I figured it was better to keep the same topic in the same thread.

Anyway, I have set up Appium with Selenium Grid to run tests remotely as part of my build process. My problem arises when I need to get the Appium nodes to retrieve the APK from the build step. Since the Appium nodes are remote, I can’t use just a filepath, since the nodes will definitely not find the APK from their filesystems. What are some of the simplest ways that you have tried to get a freshly built APK to your Appium tests? I’m currently leaning towards using URLs to point to the APK for Appium.

Ways I’ve thought of so far:

  1. Run a file server on the build server. When the APK is built, move the APK to the document root for the file server so that the Appium nodes can download the APK when they start their tests. Major issue: might have to deal with permissions and access controls, especially on a system with SELinux enabled.
  2. Publish the APK to some external storage e.g. Amazon S3. The test will download the APK from this provider.
  3. Split the build job into two separate jobs, where the completion of one job triggers the second job. The second job will build and run the tests, and it will retrieve the APK as an artifact from the first job through Jenkins.

I’m currently giving option #1 a try. I think option #3 is probably the easiest, but I would like to the assembly and test portions are together as one job.