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Set up an Android development environment on Compute Engine

Author(s): @Rishit-dagli ,   Published: 2020-07-06

Contributed by the Google Cloud community. Not official Google documentation.

This tutorial shows how to set up Android Studio on Google Cloud in just a few minutes. Follow this tutorial to configure an Android Studio development environment on an Ubuntu or Windows Server virtual machine (VM) instance on Compute Engine with the ability to use the Android Emulator and accelerate your development. This setup creates a full-fledged environment that can do Gradle builds in as little as a second.

Objectives

  • Understand nested virtualization in Google Cloud.
  • Connect to a GUI-based instance.
  • Use nested virtualization to test your apps.

Before you begin

To follow the steps in this tutorial, you need a Google Cloud project. You can use an existing project or create a new project.

You run the commands in this tutorial using the gcloud command-line tool. To install the Google Cloud SDK, which includes the gcloud tool, follow these instructions.

Costs

This tutorial uses billable components of Google Cloud, including Compute Engine.

Use the pricing calculator to generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage. New Google Cloud users might be eligible for a free trial.

Here is a prefilled pricing calculator if you follow this tutorial:

  • If you use Linux VMs: Costs
  • If you use Windows VMs: Costs

Why the simple approach doesn’t work

If you have tried to use the Android development environment without following the steps in this tutorial, you might have encountered an error like the following while creating the AVD and testing your project: "HAXM doesn't support nested virtual machines."

By default, Google Cloud blocks the ability to create nested virtual machines, so Android Studio runs, but you can't run an AVD using the emulator. This tutorial shows how to solve this problem, using nested virtualization.

For details of how nested virtualization works and what restrictions exist for nested virtualization, see Enabling nested virtualization for VM instances.

Create a Compute Engine instance

  1. Make a boot disk:

    gcloud compute disks create disk1 --image-project debian-cloud --image-family debian-9 --size 100 --zone us-central1-b

    This command makes a boot disk called disk1 with a Debian Linux image. If you want to make a Windows Server instance, for example, you can change the parameters as follows:

    gcloud compute disks create disk1 --image-family windows-2016 --image-project gce-uefi-images --size 100 --zone us-central1-b

    The VM image family must be from this list.

  2. Create a custom image with the special license key required for virtualization, replacing [NAME_OF_IMAGE] with any name that you like:

    gcloud compute images create [NAME_OF_IMAGE] 
--source-disk disk1 
--source-disk-zone us-central1-b 
--licenses "https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/vm-options/global/licenses/enable-vmx"

    This command creates an image from the boot disk and applies the license necessary to allow nested virtualization.

  3. Delete the source disk if you no longer need it.

  4. Create a VM instance using the new custom image with the license:

    gcloud compute instances create [NAME_OF_VM] 
--zone us-central1-b
--min-cpu-platform "Intel Haswell" 
--image [NAME_OF_IMAGE]
--custom-cpu = 4 
--custom-memory = 15

    This command creates a VM instance with the image you just created. You can change the custom-cpu and custom-memory values, but the values given here are enough to run Android Studio.

If you made a Windows instance, then you are done with this setup, and you should continue to the "Connecting to an instance" section below. This is because Google Cloud sets up a connection stream and desktop GUI (graphical user interface) needed for Android Studio for Windows instances.

If you made a Linux instance, then you need to complete the steps in the next section.

Configure the instance (Linux only)

You need a graphical user interface to use Android Studio, which is not set up by default for Linux instances. In this section, you create a desktop environment and make a connection channel so that you can connect to your VM with that desktop environment. You can use GNOME, Xfce, or any of a large number of options. This tutorial uses LXDE, because it takes little time to download.

  1. Connect to your instance using SSH.

  2. Install LXDE:

    sudo apt-get install lxde

    Follow the instructions and agree to the questions to install the package.

  3. Install TightVNC Server, which is used to establish a VNC connection:

    sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

  4. Set up a firewall rule to allow the VNC server to access port 5901:

    1. Navigate to VPC networks > Firewall.
    2. Click Create a firewall rule.
    3. Choose a name and target tag for the firewall rule, and set allowed protocols to tcp:5901.
    4. Save the firewall rule.
    5. Navigate to VM instances > Edit VM > Networking.
    6. Add the target tag in the network tag textbox. You might need to stop the instance to do this.

  5. Open .vnc/xtsrtup in a text editor and add /usr/bin/startlxde at the end of the file. This tells VNC to render the LXDE desktop at startup.

Connect to a desktop environment on a Linux instance

  1. Connect to your instance with SSH.

  2. Start a VNC server session:

    vncserver

    Use a VNC viewer like Tight VNC.

    Your VNC Viewer might look something like this:

  3. Enter the external IP address of your VM followed by :5901 to tell it to view port 5901.

Connect to a desktop environment on a Windows instance

Set up a firewall rule to allow RDP in your instance

  1. Navigate to VPC networks > Firewall.
  2. Click Create a firewall rule.
  3. Choose a name and target tag for the firewall rule, and set allowed protocols and ports to tcp:3389.
  4. Save the firewall rule.
  5. Navigate to VM instances > Edit VM > Networking.
  6. Add the target tag in the network tag textbox. You might need to stop the instance to do this.

If your local OS is Windows, then you are ready to connect without any more setup.

Open the Remote Desktop Connection app, which comes with Windows. You can run this application with mstsc.exe.

Install an RDP client if your local OS is not Windows

For macOS, download and install the Microsoft Remote Desktop client from the App Store or Cord.

For Linux, download and install FreeRDP or Remmina.

You are now ready to connect to your VM instance.

Set up credentials for RDP connection

In the Cloud Console click Set Windows password, make a new account, and make note of the password generated by Google Cloud.

Enter the external IP address of your VM in your RDP client. After you enter your credentials, you will be connected to your VM instance, and you should see a standard Windows GUI.

Download and install Android Studio

  1. Go to the Android Studio download page from the browser inside your instance.
  2. Follow the instructions to install Android Studio on your VM.
  3. Follow these instructions to create a new AVD configured however you like.

You're ready to start building with Android Studio.

Here's an indication of the first Gradle build happening in just over a second when the author used this setup:

Troubleshooting

Permission denied message

If you get a dev\kvm permission denied message for a Linux instance, do the following:

  1. Install qemu-kvm:

    sudo apt install qemu-kvm

  2. Add your user to the kvm group:

    sudo adduser [USERNAME] kvm

AVD doesn't start

If your AVD doesn't start, edit your advanced AVD settings to increase the heap size to 512 MB or more.

Graphics aren't rendered on AVD

If graphics aren't rendered on the AVD when you are using the GPU, edit your AVD settings to switch the Emulated Performance setting to Software.

Cleaning up

After you've finished the tutorial, you can clean up the resources that you created on Google Cloud so that you won't be billed for them in the future. The following sections describe how to delete or turn off these resources.

Deleting the project

The easiest way to eliminate billing is to delete the project you created for the tutorial.

Warning: If you used an existing project, deleting a project also deletes any other work that you've done in the project. You can't reuse the project ID of a deleted project. If you created a custom project ID that you plan to use in the future, you should delete the resources inside the project instead; this ensures that URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, remain available.

To delete the project:

  1. In the Cloud Console, go to the Projects page.
  2. Click the trash can icon to the right of the project name.

Deleting instances

To delete a Compute Engine instance, do the following:

  1. In the Cloud Console, go to the VM instances page.
  2. Click the checkbox next to the instance that you created.
  3. Click the Delete button at the top of the page to delete the instance.

Deleting firewall rules for the default network

To delete a firewall rule, do the following:

  1. In the Cloud Console, go to the Firewall rules page.
  2. Click the checkbox next to the firewall rule that you want to delete.
  3. Click the Delete button at the top of the page to delete the firewall rule.

Next steps

To learn more about nested virtualization, read Enabling nested virtualization for VM instances.

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