The Trade Federation Console is an optional component that allows you to inspect the state of Trade Federation and what it sees, from the device states to the current tests in progress.
It is a great tool for monitoring a large number of tests running in parallel and understanding the progress of each test.
Reach the console
Once Tradefed is built, the tradefed.sh launcher script is accessible from
your path and by default will take you to the console.
The console presents itself with the tf > prompt.
What can the console do?
The help of the console will always list the most up-to-date information.
A few interesting features of it are:
- List the devices and how Tradefed sees their state:
list devices - List the currently running invocations and their metadata:
list invocations - Get the logs of all running invocations and Tradefed:
dump logs
The console allows you to debug what is happening in Tradefed and the devices by querying some states that are not shown together anywhere else.
How do I avoid the console?
In several cases the console is not needed, or example When running a one-time command.
In such cases, commandAndExit can be added to the tradefed.sh
launcher script command in order to prevent the console from starting. This
extra argument is needed when attempting to run Tradefed as part of a script
or piping its output directly. Letting the console enabled while running
Tradefed from a script will triggered an inconsistent behavior and might
cause several issues.
tradefed.sh run commandAndExit <usual command>
Console autocompletion
The console provides basic autocompletion of configuration names.
tf > run <hit TAB>
result in:
Display all 167 possibilities? (y or n)
By hitting TAB after the run you can get the full list of configurations
available. And if you have a partial name already typed in, the console will
print all the possibilities.
tf >run tf/<HIT TAB>
tf/acceptance tf/fake tf/func
tf/stress tf/uiautomator tf/unit-runner
tf >run tf/
This is a useful when you don't remember an exact configuration name.