Hosts for custom test environments

Device Farm supports a set of operating systems with pre-configured software through the use of a test host environment. During test execution, Device Farm utilizes Amazon-managed instances (hosts) that dynamically connect to the selected device under test. This instance is fully cleaned up and not re-used between runs, and is terminated with its generated artifacts after the test run concludes.

Available test hosts for custom test environments

The test hosts are fully managed by Device Farm. The following table lists the currently available and supported Device Farm test hosts for custom test environments.

Operating system version

Each available test host uses a specific version of the operating system supported on Device Farm at the time. Although we try to be on the latest OS version, this may might not be the latest publicly distributed version available. Device Farm will periodically update the operating system with minor version updates and security patches.

To know the specific version (including the minor version) of the operating system in use during your test run, you can add the following snippet of code to any of your test spec file's phases.

phases:
  install:
    commands:
      # The following example prints the instance's operating system version details
      - |-
        if [[ "Darwin" == "$(uname)" ]]; then
          echo "$(sw_vers --productName) $(sw_vers --productVersion) ($(sw_vers --buildVersion))";
        else
          echo "$(. /etc/os-release && echo $PRETTY_NAME) ($(uname -r))";
        fi

Selecting a test host for custom test environments

You can specify the Android and iOS test host in the appropriate android_test_host and ios_test_host variables of your test spec file.

If you do not specify a test host selection for the given device platform, tests will run on the test host that Device Farm has set as the default for the specified device and test configuration.

As an example, review the following code snippet:

version: 0.1
android_test_host: amazon_linux_2
ios_test_host: macos_sequoia

phases:
  # ...