Trade Federation Console

The Trade Federation Console is an optional component that allows you to inspect the state of Trade Federation and what it sees, from the device states to the current tests in progress.

It is a great tool for monitoring a large number of tests running in parallel and understanding the progress of each test.

Reaching the console

Once Tradefed is built, the launcher script is accessible from your path and by default will take you to the console.

The console presents itself with the tf > prompt.

What can the console do?

The help of the console will always list the most up-to-date information. A few interesting features of it are:

  • List the devices and how Tradefed sees their state: list devices
  • List the currently running invocations and their metadata: list invocations
  • Get the logs of all running invocations and Tradefed: dump logs

The console allows you to debug what is happening in Tradefed and the devices by querying some states that are not shown together anywhere else.

How to avoid the console?

In several cases the console is not needed, or example When running a one-time command.

In such cases, commandAndExit can be added to the launcher script command in order to prevent the console from starting. This extra argument is needed when attempting to run Tradefed as part of a script or piping its output directly. Letting the console enabled while running Tradefed from a script will triggered an inconsistent behavior and might cause several issues. run commandAndExit <usual command>

Console autocompletion

The console provides basic autocompletion of configuration names.

tf > run <hit TAB>
result in:
Display all 167 possibilities? (y or n)

By hitting TAB after the run you can get the full list of configurations available. And if you have a partial name already typed in, the console will print all the possibilities.

tf >run tf/<HIT TAB>

tf/acceptance            tf/fake                  tf/func
tf/stress                tf/uiautomator           tf/unit-runner
tf >run tf/

This is a useful when you don't remember an exact configuration name.