Outline
In this blog post I will show you how to prepare a self hosted Azure Agent for Flutter and Android SDK. This is useful if you want to run your Flutter builds, tests and even publish to the Google Play Store on a self hosted Azure Agent. The following steps will be covered:
Install Flutter
The first step is to install Flutter. This can be done by following the official guide on the Flutter website. But here is a quick summary of the steps:
Create a directory for the Flutter SDK
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| mkdir ~/flutter_sdk
cd ~/flutter_sdk
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Download the Flutter SDK
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| wget https://storage.googleapis.com/flutter_infra_release/releases/stable/linux/flutter_linux_3.19.5-stable.tar.xz
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| tar xf flutter_linux_3.19.5-stable.tar.xz
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Add the Flutter SDK to your PATH
This is best done by editing your .bashrc file:
Edit the .bashrc file
and adding the following line at the end of the file:
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| export PATH="$PATH:`pwd`/flutter/bin"
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Execute the .bashrc file
Now you should be able to run flutter doctor and see the output.
Run flutter doctor
If you are on WSL2 and get this error:
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| /usr/bin/env: ‘bash\r’: No such file or directory
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Then you need to edit the /etc/wsl.conf file
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| sudo nano /etc/wsl.conf
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and add the following lines:
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| [interop]
appendWindowsPath=false
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Then restart the WSL2 instance:
Install Android SDK
Install the prerequisites
This guide assumes you are running Ubuntu. If you are running a different Linux distribution, the package manager commands might be different. We need to install the following prerequisites:
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| sudo apt update
sudo apt install openjdk-17-jdk
sudo apt install unzip
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Create a directory for the Android SDK
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| cd ~/
mkdir ~/android
cd ~/android
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Download the Android SDK
Get the latest version of the Android SDK from the Android Developer website. Scroll down to the “Command line tools only” section and download(get the URL) the latest version for Linux.
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| wget https://dl.google.com/android/repository/commandlinetools-linux-11076708_latest.zip
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(Amend the URL to the latest version.)
Extract the Android SDK archive
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| unzip commandlinetools-linux-11076708_latest.zip
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Re-arrange the folder structure
The Android SDK expects the cmdline-tools folder to be inside another cmdline-tools folder. So we need to re-arrange the folder structure.
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| mkdir android_sdk
mv cmdline-tools android_sdk
cd android_sdk
mv cmdline-tools latest
mkdir cmdline-tools
mv latest cmdline-tools
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The folder structure should now look like this:
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| android
├── android_sdk
│ ├── build-tools
│ ├── cmdline-tools
│ ├── emulator
│ ├── licenses
│ ├── platform-tools
│ ├── platforms
│ └── tools
└── commandlinetools-linux-11076708_latest.zip
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And the cmdline-tools folder should contain the latest folder.
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| android/android_sdk/cmdline-tools/
└── latest
├── NOTICE.txt
├── bin
├── lib
└── source.properties
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Install the minimum required SDK components
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| cd ~/android/android_sdk/cmdline-tools/latest/bin
./sdkmanager "platform-tools" "platforms;android-34" "build-tools;34.0.0"
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Accept the licenses
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| ./sdkmanager --licenses
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| flutter config --android-sdk ~/android/android_sdk
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Accept the Android SDK licenses
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| flutter doctor --android-licenses
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Run flutter doctor again
You should now see that the Android SDK is installed and configured correctly.
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| [✓] Flutter (Channel stable, 3.19.5, on Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS 5.15.146.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2, locale C.UTF-8)
[✓] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices (Android SDK version 34.0.0)
[✗] Chrome - develop for the web (Cannot find Chrome executable at google-chrome) <SNIP>
[!] Android Studio (not installed)
[✓] Connected device (1 available)
[✓] Network resources
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For our purposes, we don’t need Chrome or Android Studio. But you can install them if you need them.
Conclusion
That’s it! We have now prepare our Linux based self hosted Azure DevOps Agent that is ready to build, test and publish Flutter apps to the Google Play Store.
See the link below for the official Microsoft documentation on how to setup a self-hosted Linux agent.
References
Here’s the offical Microsoft documentation on self-hosted Linux agents.