If we were running ADB on our own without Appium, we’d accomplish our goal by running:Īdb shell rm -rf /mnt/sdcard/Pictures/*.*

args: an array of Strings, the arguments passed to the shell command.įor example, let’s say we want to clear out the pictures on the SD card, and that on our device, these are located at /mnt/sdcard/Pictures.

command: a String, the command to be run under adb shell.

Here’s how a call to “ mobile: shell” looks in Java:ĭriver.executeScript(“mobile: shell”, arg) Īrg needs to be a JSONifiable object with two keys: The Appium “ mobile:” commands are special commands that can be accessed using executeScript (at least until client libraries make a nicer interface for taking advantage of them). With Appium running in this mode, you have access to a new “ mobile:” command called “ mobile: shell“.

So you can now start up Appium like this to run arbitrary ADB commands, This is achieved using –relaxed-security flag. Recently, the Appium team decided to unlock this functionality behind a special server flag, so that someone running an Appium server could intentionally open up this security hole.

It would be a huge security hole to give any Appium client the full power of ADB in this context. This is because Appium was designed to run in a remote environment, possibly sharing an OS with other services or Appium servers, and potentially many connected Android devices. adb shell is the perfect tool for solving many problems.Īppium did not allow running of arbitrary ADB commands. One of these commands is adb shell, which gives you shell access to the device filesystem (including root access on emulators or rooted devices).

ADB is a powerful tool provided as part of the Android SDK by Google, that allows running all sorts of interesting commands on a connected emulator or device. If you’re not a big Android person, you might not know about ADB, the “Android Debug Bridge”.

Appium server set to relaxed security