Add shell to PatrolIntegrationTester, or ability to execute code on testing machine

[Sevastyan]

Use case

I am writing patrol test to test my Flutter app on Android emulator on my machine. I want to be able to run terminal commands on my host machine during the patrol test (inside the PatrolTesterCallback).

This feature request is indeed related to the problem I am having, however the feature will serve a much wider variety of cases than described shortly.

So, the problem is that I cannot trigger Android's flow for handling URLs of Instant Apps. When testing manually, I usually fire this terminal command:

adb shell 'am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW -d "https://..." com.my.applicationId'

this brings up this system UI:

And then, when testing manually, I click "OPEN APP", which opens Android Instant App, from which I download my full app and get to testing further.

The adb command above is not the only one I wish to be able to run from within the patrol test. I also want to generate the URL during the test, and for this I have a nifty CLI command on my machine (it contacts my server to get me the URL).

To sum up, I want to start my patrol test by running a few terminal commands (executing them on my host machine), and then start using patrol's finders to assert what is shown on the emulator's screen.

---

What I have tried:

There is already a native openUrl method provided by patrol. However, it never opens the Android's UI as in the picture above - it simply opens the browser (not even my app, which actually handles the URL nicely). openUrl will only open my app, if the URL schema is a custom schema that my app supports. I mean, my app support both "https://" and "mycustomapp" shemas. But with patrol I am not able to test "https" schema, as it always opens the browser. This, obviously, makes it impossible to test the real user flow - user clicking on the URL, user making a decision to continue viewing the URL in the Instant App, user interacting with Instant App, user downloading the full app, and user interacting with the full app.

Proposal

void main() {
  patrolTest(
    'My test.',
    ($) async {
      final result = $.host.run('command', ['option', 'value']); // akin to Process.run on the host
      // use result...
    },
  );
}

[bartekpacia]

this was implemented in #630 but then removed