ADB tools

The session page talks to the device’s ADB itself, in the browser, so you don’t need adb, SSH or a key on your machine. The tools sit in tabs next to DevTools:

• Logcat follows the main, system and crash buffers. By default it shows only lines from your app (matched by the app’s user id, so it keeps working across restarts and covers all of its processes); switch to Everything for the whole device. Filter by level and text, pause, clear, and download what is shown. When the app crashes, a notification shows the first lines of the stack trace with a link to the log. The log is collected from the moment the device is ready and survives app restarts and installing another build.
• Files browses the device: shared storage, the app’s private data (/data/data/<package>: shared preferences, databases, WebView cookies and storage), /data/local/tmp and the whole file system. Download files, upload them with the button or by dropping them onto the list (handy for testing file pickers), create folders and delete.
• Terminal is a shell with a real terminal (colours, top, line editing). On emulators it only appears when the provider allows arbitrary commands (redroid.shell: full); by default it is off, because that shell is root on the node running the session.

The App and Device cards next to the phone use the same connection:

• App restarts or reinstalls the app and saves its data (these work without ADB), and over ADB shows the installed version, opens deep links (myapp://… or https://…, optionally only in your app, with a history kept in the browser), grants and revokes runtime permissions, force-stops the app, clears its data, puts the device into deep doze and moves the app between standby buckets.
• Device shows the model, Android version, ABIs and build, switches the WebView provider when the image has more than one (restart the app afterwards), and builds bug reports: Bundle is a zip with a screenshot, the logcat collected in the tab, device and app details, ready to attach to a bug; Full report runs Android’s own bugreportz.

Recording a session is done by the server, with logcat and the device’s state next to the screen: see Recordings.

Configuration

adb:
  browser: true # session pages may open ADB
  ownerOnly: true # only a session's owner and admins may

On emulators ADB is a root shell without an authorization prompt, so anyone with the tools can run anything on that device, and because redroid shares the node’s kernel, root there reaches the node too (see Security). With ownerOnly (the default) other users get only the screen and DevTools of sessions that aren’t theirs; set it to false to give everyone the tools, or browser: false to turn them off. Each connection is audited as adb.connect and adb.disconnect; see Monitoring and audit.

Requests that would restart adbd or the device or move ADB somewhere else (reboot, unroot, remount, tcpip, usb, sideload, disable-verity) are refused here and over SSH, because they would cut the session off from its own device. On phones the phone provider also refuses root, reverse forwards and the frida-server ports, and limits shell commands with adb.shell.

On emulators the same redroid.shell policy applies to the browser and the holtdroid client: allowlist (the default) runs only the commands behind the Logcat tab and the app and device cards, plus file transfer, so Files browses, downloads and uploads, without its Delete and New folder buttons; full runs anything and shows the Terminal tab and those buttons; off refuses every shell command. See Emulator provider.

The browser keeps an ADB key in its storage; emulators don’t ask for it.