Android Command Line Tooling Setup

Android Studio installs the basic emulator binaries by default but the command-line tools required for Drizz Desktop such as avdmanager, sdkmanager and the ability to run the emulator command from any terminal often require a few additional steps. These tools must also be accessible through your system’s environment variables.

The following steps explains how to enable full command-line emulator support in a clean, predictable way.

Step 1: Ensure Required Tools Are Installed

To use emulator commands from the terminal, install the following SDK components:

1. Open Android Studio → Settings (or Preferences on macOS).

2. Go to Languages & Frameworks → Android SDK.

3. Select the SDK Tools tab.

4. Verify the following items are enabled:

• Android Emulator

• Android SDK Platform-Tools

• Android SDK Command-line Tools

1. Click Apply to install or update them.

Step 2: Add Tools to Your System PATH

Installing the tools alone is not enough. To run commands like emulator, adb, sdkmanager or avdmanager from any terminal, you must add their directories to your system PATH.

These directories exist inside your Android SDK Location (visible at the top of the SDK Manager screen).

Tool	Required Folder Path
emulator	…/Android/sdk/emulator
adb	…/Android/sdk/platform-tools
sdkmanager / avdmanager	…/Android/sdk/cmdline-tools/latest/bin

Important: Always use the /emulator directory for the emulator binary. The older version inside /tools is deprecated and does not support modern features.

After updating your PATH, restart the terminal to apply changes.

Step 3: Relevant Official Documentation

For deeper reference, here are the official Android documentation pages that correspond to the tools mentioned:

• Start the emulator from the command line https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator-commandline

• Command-line tools overview https://developer.android.com/tools

• Emulator console commands https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator-console

These resources provide complete command references, startup flags and advanced interaction options.

Step 4: Verification

To confirm your environment is configured correctly, run:

emulator -list-avds

If it returns a list of AVDs, your setup is correct. If you receive “command not found,” the PATH configuration has not been applied correctly.