84.8 Generating Test APK Files

An optional step at this stage is to generate APK files from the app bundle and install and run them on devices or emulator sessions. Google provides a command-line tool called bundletool designed specifically for this purpose which can be downloaded from the following URL:

https://github.com/google/bundletool/releases

At time of writing, bundletool is provide as a .jar file which can be executed from the command line as follows (noting that the version number may have changed since this book was published):

java -jar bundletool-all-0.9.0.jar

Running the above command will list all of the options available within the tool. To generate the APK files from the app bundle, the build-apks option is used. To generate APK files that can be installed onto a device or emulator the files will also need to be signed. To achieve this include the --ks option specifying the path of the keystore file created earlier in the chapter, together with the --ks...