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Connect a Mobile App to Your Local Stack

Sometimes we need to test a feature on a mobile app by connecting it to our locally installed stack. For this to work, we need to achieve some things.

Prerequisite¶

Have a local stack installed
Have an Android emulator created

Start the emulator with the ability to remount its file system as writable¶

Since we will need to edit the hosts of the emulator, we need to be able to remount its file system as writable. For that, we need to start our emulator with the following command:

./emulator -writable-system -avd Pixel_API_27

The emulator binary is located at /home/user/Android/Sdk/emulator/ on Linux systems by default. Pixel_API_27 is the name of the emulator I want to start. If you don’t know the name of your emulator, you can get it with:

./emulator -list-avds

Root the emulator¶

Now that the emulator is started, we need to gain root access on it. Run the following command:

adb root

This restarts the adb daemon with root privileges.

Remount the file system as writable¶

By default, the file system is read-only. We need it to be writable, so we run this command:

adb remount

Pull the emulator’s hosts file¶

To edit the hosts file, we need to pull it on our system:

adb pull /etc/hosts hosts

This creates a hosts file in your current directory.

Edit the hosts¶

For the emulator to be able to connect to our stack, we need to add the IP address of our machine to the hosts. Actually, we don’t really need it since in an Android emulator 10.0.2.2 is automatically pointing to our machine. So we just need to add this to the hosts file:

10.0.2.2 cozy.tools

Push the new file to the emulator¶

Now that we have added what’s necessary in the file, we have to push it to the emulator:

adb push hosts /system/etc/hosts

Then try to ping cozy.tools to see if everything is working well:

adb shell ping cozy.tools

You can now enter http://cozy.tools in the login page of your mobile app and you will not get an error anymore.