Introduction
This is a template for doing Android development using GitLab and fastlane. It is based on the tutorial for Android apps in general that can be found here. If you're learning Android at the same time, you can also follow along that tutorial and learn how to do everything all at once.
Reference links
You'll definitely want to read through the blog post since that walks you in detail through a working production configuration using this model.
Getting started
First thing is to follow the Android tutorial and get Android Studio installed on your machine, so you can do development using the Android IDE. Other IDE options are possible, but not directly described or supported here. If you're using your own IDE, it should be fairly straightforward to convert these instructions to use with your preferred toolchain.
What's contained in this project
Android code
The state of this project is as if you followed the first few steps in the linked Android tutorial and have created your project. You're definitely going to want to open up the project and change the settings to match what you plan to build. In particular, you're at least going to want to change the following:
- Application Name: "My First App"
- Company Domain: "example.com"
Fastlane files
It also has fastlane setup per our blog post on getting GitLab CI set up with fastlane. Note that you may want to update your fastlane bundle to the latest version; if a newer version is available, the pipeline job output will tell you.
Dockerfile build environment
In the root there is a Dockerfile which defines a build environment which will be used to ensure consistent and reliable builds of your Android application using the correct Android SDK and other details you expect. Feel free to add any build-time tools or whatever else you need here.
We generate this environment as needed because installing the Android SDK for every pipeline run would be very slow.
Gradle configuration
The gradle configuration is exactly as output by Android Studio except for the version name being updated to
Instead of:
versionName "1.0"
It is now set to:
versionName "1.0-${System.env.VERSION_SHA}"
You'll want to update this for whatever versioning scheme you prefer.
Build configuration (.gitlab-ci.yml)
The sample project also contains a basic .gitlab-ci.yml which will successfully
build the Android application.
Note that for publishing to the test channels or production, you'll need to set up your secret API key. The stub code is here for that, but please see our blog post for details on how to set this up completely. In the meantime, publishing steps will fail.
The build script also handles automatic versioning by relying on the CI pipeline ID to generate a unique, ever increasing number. If you have a different versioning scheme you may want to change this.
- "export VERSION_CODE=$(($CI_PIPELINE_IID)) && echo $VERSION_CODE"
- "export VERSION_SHA=`echo ${CI_COMMIT_SHA:0:8}` && echo $VERSION_SHA"