

3.4 KiB

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 AOSP build due to package updates as is sometimes common on rolling distributions like Arch Linux.

Production build servers and integration test servers should also use the same Docker image and environment. This eliminate most surprises in breakages by by empowering developers and production builds to use the exact same environment. The hope is that breakages will be caught earlier by the devs.

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

For Mac OS X and Windows users, consider kylemanna/vagrant-aosp as a good virtual machine to enable development.

Build Dockers

  • For Nougat docker build -t nougat -f Dockerfile_7.0 .
  • For Marshmallow and Lollipop docker build -t lollipop -f Dockerfile_5.0-6.0 .
  • For kitkat docker build -t kitkat -f Dockerfile_kitkat .


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 kitkat ; cd kitkat export AOSP_VOL=$PWD curl -O bash ./

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/ for an example of a complete fetch and build of AOSP.


  • Android Kitkat android-4.4.4_r2.0.1