hqarroum/docker-android

Docker-Android is a project that packages an Android phone emulator inside a Docker container so it can run on a server without a physical device or a graphical display. The emulator starts up as a background service, and you can connect to it remotely using standard Android developer tools. This is useful for automated testing pipelines where you want to run Android apps against different Android versions without needing a rack of physical phones or a developer workstation. The image is built on Alpine Linux to keep its size down, though it still requires several gigabytes because the Android emulator itself is large. You can choose which version of Android to install by setting a build argument at image-build time, letting you create multiple variants for testing across API levels. You can also choose whether to include the Google Play Store, which some apps require to function. Because the emulator requires hardware virtualization, the container needs access to the host machine's KVM device, a Linux kernel feature for running virtual machines. This means it works on Linux servers that have KVM enabled but does not run on most cloud virtual machines without nested virtualization support. The README notes that you need at least 4 GB of memory and 8 GB of disk space for modern Android versions. Once the container is running, you connect to it using ADB, the standard Android debug bridge tool, over a network port. You can also use a separate screen-mirroring tool called scrcpy to see and interact with the emulator's display from your own machine. This project is aimed at developers and CI/CD teams who want a consistent, scriptable Android test environment that does not depend on physical hardware.