Skip to content

Building Robolectric

This page describes how to set up a development environment to build and test Robolectric on the supported OSs (Linux, Mac, Windows).

Installing Android SDK Tools

This can be achieved by either installing Android Studio (recommended), or Android's command line tools. We recommend using the latest stable release of Android Studio, because Robolectric uses the latest stable version of the Android Gradle Plugin.

Robolectric's integration tests require Android Build Tools to be installed and specific SDK versions to be installed. Please check the relevant modules to know which versions to install.

Configure necessary environments

System environment ANDROID_HOME

Current Robolectric repository requires system environment ANDROID_HOME to retrieve the official android.jar for internal validation.

For macOS, there are some potential configuration files that Android Studio might recognize:

  1. ~/.bash_profile.
  2. ~/.zprofile.

Install required android.jar

Current Robolectric repository requires android-34.jar installed in $ANDROID_HOME/platforms/android-34/android.jar.

The simplest way is to use Android Studio's SDK Manager to install it.

Install Git and OpenJDK 17

JDK 17 is currently required to build Robolectric. Newer versions of the JDK (e.g. 21) will likely work, but may contain some rough edges.

  1. Install Git to download Robolectric source code.
  2. Install OpenJDK 17 to build and test Robolectric. See GitHub Action setup-java to get the recommended OpenJDK distribution list. Any distribution that supports JDK 17 is recommended. Different operating systems have different OpenJDK installation and configuration tutorials, please search the internet to learn how to do it.

Download source code

Robolectric's source code is available on GitHub. You can get by running the following command:

git clone git@github.com:robolectric/robolectric.git

Building and testing

Build Robolectric

Robolectric supports running tests against multiple Android API levels. To build Robolectric, run:

./gradlew clean assemble testClasses --parallel

Run unit tests

./gradlew test --parallel

You can use the robolectric.enabledSdks argument to specify a subset of comma-separated supported API levels to test:

# Replace 32,33,34 with the API levels you want to test
./gradlew test --parallel -"Drobolectric.enabledSdks=32,33,34"

Run instrumentation tests

You can run the compatibility test suites on your connected devices (either a physical device or an emulator) by running:

./gradlew connectedAndroidTest

If you're using Windows, it's recommended to use PowerShell in Windows Terminal.

Next step

Once you're up and running, you can have a look at the architecture documentation to learn more about Robolectric's components.