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Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane
Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane: Automating mobile application development and deployment for iOS and Android

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Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

Setting Up fastlane and Our Sample Project

In the previous chapter, we got a bird's-eye view of what fastlane (https://docs.fastlane.tools/) is, along with all the actions that it encompasses. In the next chapter, we will begin to explore each action in isolation in greater detail, but before showing you how you can include fastlane as part of the toolchain, and rather than describe its abstract functionality, this chapter will explain the concepts in context through real-life scenarios.

We will project the narrative of you being in a start-up, working on a real-life app, which is in fact, a popular open source app, Firefox for iOS (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios). We will be referring to this code base and app throughout the book to illustrate how you, as a developer, will vastly enhance your development environment and workflow through the use of fastlane...

Installing the Xcode command-line tools

The first thing we are going to do is make sure you have your Xcode command-line environment set up. You should already have Xcode installed, but we will need its associative command-line tools because of the GCC compiler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection).

It is assumed that you have macOS Sierra installed, but if not, it will most likely work with older versions, though this is not guaranteed.

First, make sure you have the latest version of Xcode installed, which is Xcode 8 at the time of writing, by going to the App Store and seeing if any updates are available. Next, let's see if you already have the full Xcode package installed by typing the following in a Terminal:

$ Xcode-select -p

If you get back the full path to your Developer folder, as follows, you are already set and have the full Xcode package...

Setting up our project – Firefox for iOS

Before we set up fastlane, we will need a project to set it up over. As we will be working with others on Firefox for iOS, now that we have Git installed, let's grab the code. We will first fork the application code into our own repository; so in your browser, go to https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios and select the Fork button in the top-right corner.

You will need to have your own GitHub account and be logged in to be able to fork a repository.

Once you've forked the Mozilla project into your own repo, pull the code from the master branch as follows (note—replace with your GitHub username from the forked repository):

git clone https://github.com/<your-user-name>/firefox-ios

Before we can build the app, we will need to pull in all the project dependencies, so navigate inside the project folder...

Configuring fastlane

Great; we now have the team's project running smoothly on our computer, and we are ready to start contributing code. Realizing that our team's workflow isn't exactly efficient, we are going to take some initiative and introduce fastlane. In order to convince the rest of the team that this tool will change their world, we are going to first set it up over our forked project and demonstrate rather than theorize.

To initialize fastlane, in your project folder, simply type in the following:

fastlane init

The prompt will ask you for your Apple ID so that you can hook into iTunes Connect seamlessly through the command line. After you've gone through all the prompt questions, fastlane will create a fastlane directory and fetch all of your app metadata from iTunes Connect.

You will need to ensure your Apple ID has been given the correct...

Summary

This chapter provided you with the foundations for setting up your environment, along with the sample project we will be working from, Firefox for iOS (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios), cloned and running on your machine. We went through a brief explanation of some of the tools we will be using alongside fastlane, such as Carthage (https://github.com/Carthage/Carthage) and Homebrew (https://brew.sh/).

This is the last of the introductory chapters, as we are now well on our path toward becoming efficient continuous deployment contributors and helping our fictitious team deploy earlier, more rapidly, and more efficiently. In the next chapter, we are going start solving real-life problems and using fastlane to create and maintain provisioning profiles with a sigh.

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Key benefits

  • A practical guide on automating your mobile development pipeline with Fastlane, Jenkins, and Slack.
  • Build, test, run and deploy your mobile application release with this end to end guide.
  • Implement Continuous Integration, delivery, and deployment practices to optimize your application development workflow for faster and efficient release builds.

Description

Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing. This book starts off with a brief introduction to fastlane—a robust command-line tool that enables iOS and Android developers to automate their releasing workflow. The book then explores and guides you through all of its features and utilities; it provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the tool and how to implement them. Themes include setting up and managing your certificates and provisioning and push notification profiles; automating the creation of apps and managing the app metadata on iTunes Connect and the Apple Developer Portal; and building, distributing and publishing your apps to the App Store. You will also learn how to automate the generation of localized screenshots and mesh your continuous delivery workflow into a continuous integration workflow for a more robust setup. By the end of the book, you will gain substantial knowledge on delivering bug free, developer-independent, and stable application release cycle.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for mobile developers who are keen on incorporating Continuous integration and deployment practices in their workflow.

What you will learn

  • • Harness the fastlane tools for the Continuous Deployment strategy
  • • Integrate Continuous Deployment with existing Continuous Integration.
  • • Automate upload of screenshots across all device screen-sizes
  • • Manage push notifications, provisioning profiles, and code-signing certificates
  • • Orchestrate automated build and deployments of new versions of your app
  • • Regulate your TestFlight users and on-board new testers

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Feb 28, 2018
Length: 346 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788398510
Vendor :
Google
Languages :
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Feb 28, 2018
Length: 346 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788398510
Vendor :
Google
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

20 Chapters
Introduction to fastlane and Continuous Delivery Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Setting Up fastlane and Our Sample Project Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Manage Provisioning Profiles with sigh Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Manage Code Signing Certificates with cert Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Sync Profiles and Certificates with match Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Manage Push Notification Profiles with pem Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating Our iOS and Android Apps with produce and supply Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Build and Package Apps for the App Store with gym Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Distribute to Testers with TestFlight and Crashlytics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Review Your App Metadata with precheck Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Taking Localized Screenshots with snapshot Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Put Our Screenshots Inside Frames with frameit Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Upload Screenshots and Metadata with deliver Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Automate Unit Tests with scan Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Integrating Git into the fastlane Workflow Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating and Using fastlane Action Plugins Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Integrating Slack into the fastlane Workflow Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Continuous Delivery Best Practices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Configurations, Tools, and Resources Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
(2 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 0%
3 star 50%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Alex Curylo Apr 14, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
It’s actually not 100% accurate, that title; a more accurate one would be “The Complete Beginner’s Guide To How To Ship An iOS App With fastlane Making It Suck Less.” That wasn’t quite as buzzword-compliant, we suppose.If you do happen to be an iOS-focused complete beginner at dealing with iTunes Connect and all, and you intend to follow the common path of Crashlytics and/or TestFlight for beta distribution … then yes, we believe we can recommend this unqualifiedly as the most coherent introduction out there, go buy it and you can stop reading now!If you’ve already got this distribution thing sussed, and you’re just curious about whether this fastlane thing that all the cool kids are into these days is worth adopting … hmmm, we’ll give it a three out of five. It’s worthy at explaining what it does explain, but to make it five-star for the more accomplished developer, we’d need two star-worthy things:1. Documentation on the Android setup and shipping process as thorough as there is for iOS. There’s about six pages worth here, which is pretty thin compared to the iOS coverage.If you couldn’t care less about shipping for Android, of course, then this is not a valid criticism.2. More thorough examples of how to integrate with CI and testing services other than the selected ones, to actually deserve the Continuous Delivery label...(Full review at "Review: Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane" on our Under The Bridge blog)
Amazon Verified review Amazon
giurobrossi Apr 10, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
I'm using Fastlane tools since a couple of years, finding them very useful especially with iOS apps with quite complicated signing configurations. This book is a good introduction to Fastlane topics: it touches all of them, but it doesn't get really deeper in the advanced ones. It's just my opinion of course, but I recommend this book to all those who want to approach the amazing Fastlane toolset. Can't wait to play with the new Fastlane CI.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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