Running a headless emulator

Knowing that headless system is a system designed to be run without a monitor you might
wonder if this really makes sense to have an emulator running without a possibility to have a look what is going on there :).

That might sound crazy but think of the continuous integration like hudson. Hudson will run the test(s) to check the stability of the build and generates reports afterwards. No one will be interested in sitting in front of the screen connected to hudson to check if the test are running ok and when the test fails. This can be obtained from the reports or the test logs and repeated (hopefully) on developers machines with the debugger connected.

Also when the UI test fails they will be discarded from the screen so you might not be even able to spot where the failure occurred.

Finally to run emulator you need X server running, a DISPLAY variable exported so might be too much of setup for simple continuous integration server.

In order to run emulator in headless mode issue a command

emulator @Android2.2 -no-window

And that is explained in help window

emulator -help
...
-no-window disable graphical window display