Integrate Fastlane to iOS project: Lesson 2

Integrate Fastlane to your iOS project

In lesson 1, we installed the need tools. After that we are going to integrate Fastlane to our iOS project now.

Initial Fastlane in your iOS Project

Go to iOS project directory, type init cmd to initial the Fastlane

Fastlane init

You will see the following screen when you are initialing Fastlane.

Installation output from Terminal

In your project directory, it should have 2 new files, named Gemfile and Gemfile.lock and 1 folder named fastlane.

Fastlane generated files for your project

Gemfile and Gemfile.lock are Ruby related files, it mentions that you have import Fastlane to your project. Most of the time you don’t need to work on that.

fastlane is a folder, which contain 2 files. Appfile is used to store the app related information, such as apple ID, app identifier. In this tutorial, we won’t use that file since we will set up different environments for different values. Fastfile is the most frequently edited file. It lets you to write the script to tell Fastlane which app should do which actions.

Create your first lane

lane is a basic unit in Fastlane, it is similar func in swift. Open your fastfile and paste the following code.

default_platform(:ios)
platform :ios do
    lane :hello_world do
       puts("hello world")   // print this message
    end
end

type the following cmd in Terminal.

bundle exec fastlane ios hello_world

and you will get the following output.

output of hello_world lane

bundle exec is used to run the specify Fastlane version in your gemfile. If the cmd is not typed, it will run the current version in your Mac.

fastlane is the cmd to execute Fastlane.

ios is used to indicated the platform is iOS.

hello_world is the lane you defined in fastfile.

What’s next?

Next lesson, we will introduces Fastlane action and start to get the certificates and provisioning profile from your Apple Developer Account by using Fastlane in order to build the app.