How to access a container

In some cases, it might be necessary to access an individual container for debugging reasons.

You can do this on the command line with the amc command, or you can use scrcpy for graphical access.

Access a container with amc

The amc command provides simple shell access to any container managed by AMS. To access a specific container you only need its ID:

amc shell <id>

This command opens a bash shell inside the container. To access the nested Android container, use the anbox-shell command inside the new shell. If you combined the anbox-shell command with amc exec, you can get direct access to the Android container:

amc exec <id> -- anbox-shell

If you only want to watch the Android log output, use the following command:

amc exec <id> -- anbox-shell logcat

amc shell and amc exec open various possibilities for automation use cases. See the help output of the commands for further details.

Access a container with scrcpy

The AMS services enable connecting remotely over a network to containers via scrcpy.
Scrcpy provides a simple way to display and control containers running on Anbox Cloud remotely.

In the next sections, you will learn how to connect a container running on Anbox Cloud via scrcpy.

Install scrcpy

Scrcpy is not available from the official Ubuntu repositories. Therefore, you must install scrcpy in one of the following ways:

• Build scrcpy from the source by following the official guide

• Install scrcpy from the Ubuntu snap store:

    sudo snap install scrcpy
  

  Note:

  The scrcpy snap package that is published to snap store is a non-official package. You can use it, but it’s at your own risk. Because of this, it’s highly recommended to build scrcpy from source by yourself.

Launch container

First, launch a container with graphics enabled:

amc launch -s +adb --enable-graphics -r default

The above command will launch a container from the default image. Since scrcpy requires ADB to establish the connection between your host and the container, the ADB service must be enabled by default. With the leading + symbol to the adb service, it exposes TCP port 5559 on the public address of the node.

Afterwards you can find the network endpoint of the container in the output of the amc ls command:

+----------------------+---------------+---------+---------+------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
|          ID          |  APPLICATION  |  TYPE   | STATUS  | NODE |    ADDRESS    |                       ENDPOINTS                       |
+----------------------+---------------+---------+---------+------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| bpg8298j1qm4og61p7q0 |    default    | regular | running | lxd0 | 192.168.100.2 | adb:192.168.100.2:5559/tcp adb:10.226.4.200:10000/tcp |
+----------------------+---------------+---------+---------+------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+

The endpoint of the ADB service exposed from the running container is available at 10.226.4.200:10000 on the public network.

Run scrcpy

Before running scrcpy to connect the running container remotely, establish the connection between your host and the container through the exposed ADB service via TCP/IP:

adb connect 10.226.4.200:10000

After the connection is established, simply run scrcpy, which will return information similar to the following:

INFO: scrcpy 1.10 <https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy>
/usr/local/share/scrcpy/scrcpy-server.jar: 1 file pushed. 9.3 MB/s (22662 bytes in 0.002s)
INFO: Initial texture: 1280x720

Then you can interact with the running Android container locally.

Through SSH tunnel

In the above example, the ADB service is exposed directly over the internet. This is a major security risk as the ADB connection is not secure. To overcome this security issue, you can use the machine where AMS is running as relay server to set up a secure and encrypted SSH tunnel by forwarding the exposed ADB TCP port from the LXD machine to your localhost through the AMS machine.

To set up a secure connection, launch the container so that it doesn’t expose the ADB service to the internet:

amc launch -s adb --enable-graphics -r default

As the ADB service is enabled for the launched container but without the leading +, the endpoint 10.226.4.168:10000/tcp shown via amc ls is not exposed to the public network:

+----------------------+---------------+---------+---------+------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
|          ID          |  APPLICATION  |  TYPE   | STATUS  | NODE |    ADDRESS    |                       ENDPOINTS                       |
+----------------------+---------------+---------+---------+------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| bpg8298j1qm4og61p7q0 |    default    | regular | running | lxd0 | 192.168.100.2 | adb:192.168.100.2:5559/tcp adb:10.226.4.168:10000/tcp |
+----------------------+---------------+---------+---------+------+---------------+-------------------------------------------------------+

Now forward any connection to port 10000 on your localhost to port 10000 on the remote LXD machine with the address 10.226.4.168 via the AMS machine with the address 10.180.45.183:

ssh -NL 10000:10.226.4.168:10000 ubuntu@10.180.45.183

In another terminal, you can connect the running container via ADB with the following command:

adb connect localhost:10000

Then run the scrcpy to display and control the Android container:

scrcpy

Last updated 3 months ago.