A demonstration of how to create a Skinned Android Virtual Device using a bash script that invokes the avdmanager command.

In order for the bash script to properly work you will need the following to be set-up and installed.

• The $ANDROID_HOME Environment variable should be set to your machines Android SDK Installation

The goal of this script is to create a Skinned Android Virtual Device using the avdmanager command line tool.

create_avd.bash skin_name sdk_version

The skin_name argument should match the name of a folder inside the skins directory. You will need an x86 System-Image for the sdk_version that you pass into the script. You can check if you have any installed system-images by running the following command: sdkmanager --list. Or you can have sdkmanager install the required package by running sdkmanager 'system-images;android-{SDK_VERSION};google_apis;x86'.

• AndroidWearRound
• AndroidWearSquare
• galaxy_nexus
• nexus_4
• nexus_5
• nexus_5x
• nexus_6
• nexus_6p
• nexus_7
• nexus_7_2013
• nexus_9
• nexus_10
• nexus_one
• nexus_s
• pixel
• pixel_c
• pixel_xl
• tv_720p
• tv_1080p

I created this script because the new avdmanager tool does not come with an option to specify a device skin. Therefore I created a script that has the ability to create an Android Virtual Device that is fully skinned.

The first step should seem pretty straight forward if you have figured out how to use the new avdmanager command. If not then this should help you out quite a bit. Probably the trickiest part of creating the AVD is the --package option that you have to exactly specify. The option is wanting the exact system-image package that sdkmanager has installed onto your machine. E.G system-images;android-25;google_apis;x86 for SDK 25.

# CREATE THE TEST DEVICE USING THE
# AVDMANAGER COMMAND.
echo "creating $DEVICE_NAME"
$AVD_CMD create avd \
--force \
--name $DEVICE_NAME \
--package "system-images;android-$DEVICE_SDK;google_apis;x86" \
--tag "google_apis" \
--device $(getAvdDeviceId $1) \
--path $DEVICE_DIRECTORY

In this step, the script is putting the specified device skin into the SDK's skins folder, so that we can tell the emulator to look in that specific location for the skin when launching the created AVD.

# COPY THE DEVICE'S SKIN INTO THE ANDROID SKINS DIRECTORY IF
# IT IS NOT ALREADY PRESENT
if [ ! -d "$DEVICE_SKINS_DIRECTORY" ]; then
  echo "copying $DEVICE skin"
  cp -r $SOURCE_SKINS_DIRECTORY/ $ANDROID_SKINS_DIRECTORY/
fi

But simply putting the skin files into the machines sdk directory is not enough for the emulator to know which skin to use when starting the AVD. For that we need to modify the config.ini that the avdmanager create avd command creates when creating the device. In the scripts root folder there is a device.template file that is used to construct the rest of the config.ini that the avdmanager tool doesn't create at this time. This is the key to making sure that the emulator will be able to use the skin that we copied in the previous step.

Here is the device.template file that gets appended to the created devices config.ini

showDeviceFrame=yes
skin.dynamic=yes
skin.name={{skin_name}}
skin.path={{skin_path}}
hw.gpu.enabled=yes
hw.gpu.mode=auto
hw.ramSize=1536

The script replaces the {{skin_name}} and {{skin_path}} to the specfied skins name and path respectively. The gpu.enabled=yes and gpu.mode=auto configuration's are added to speed up interaction with the device.

And that is honestly it. Please feel free to ask questions or submit pull requests if you find an issue that you would like to fix.
Cheers!