emulator-commands

Emulator Commands Reference (Apple Silicon only, Early Access — v3.7.0-alpha+)

This reference provides detailed syntax and examples for Android emulator commands.

Early access. Requires Orka 3.7.0-alpha or later. Apple Silicon nodes only. Commands, defaults, and behavior may change before general availability. Not recommended for production workloads. Contact [email protected] with questions or feedback.

Contents

• orka3 emulator deploy
• orka3 emulator list
• orka3 emulator delete
• Connecting via ADB
• Known Limitations

orka3 emulator deploy

Deploy an Android emulator attached to a running macOS VM. The emulator runs directly on the same physical host node as the VM (Apple Silicon does not support nested virtualization, so the emulator cannot run inside the VM itself) and connects to it over an ADB relay bridge.

Syntax:

orka3 emulator deploy --vm <VM> [--platform <PLATFORM>] [--device <DEVICE>] [--image-type <TYPE>] [--cpu <N>] [--memory <MB>] [--timeout <MIN>] [flags]

Options:

• --vm string - Name of the running macOS VM to attach the emulator to (required)
• --platform string - Android platform level (default: android-36)
• --device string - Device profile (default: pixel_9)
• --image-type string - System image type (default: google_apis)
• --cpu int - CPU cores to allocate to the emulator
• --memory int - Memory in MB to allocate to the emulator
• --timeout int - Deploy timeout in minutes (default: 5)

Examples:

orka3 emulator deploy --vm my-macos-vm
orka3 emulator deploy --vm my-macos-vm --platform android-35 --device pixel_8
orka3 emulator deploy --vm my-macos-vm --image-type google_apis_playstore --cpu 4 --memory 4096
orka3 emulator deploy --vm my-macos-vm --device pixel_tablet --timeout 10

Notes:

• Parent VM must be Running, or deploy fails with a 409.
• Platform, device, and image-type values pass straight through to the Android SDK's avdmanager/sdkmanager tooling. Any combination those tools support works on a best-effort basis — the only hard constraint is an ARM-native system image, since the emulator runs directly on the Apple Silicon host. Common values: platforms android-35/android-36; devices pixel_8/pixel_9/pixel_tablet; image types google_apis/google_apis_playstore/default.
• Deploy blocks until the emulator reaches Running or Failed, or until the timeout elapses — whichever comes first. A timeout is not necessarily a failure: the emulator may still be Pending while its AVD boots. Poll with orka3 emulator list until it settles.
• Response includes adbRelayIP and adbRelayPort — always use these values to connect (see Connecting via ADB), never hardcode an IP or port.
• First deploy on a node may be slow: Android SDK components (roughly 2-4GB per platform/image-type pair) download at deploy time if not already cached on the host. There is no pre-caching in early access.
• Emulator lifecycle is tied to the parent VM — deleting the VM automatically cleans up its emulator(s).