Fastlane — Ch: 1 . Getting Started

Understanding Fastlane and setting it up into your project.

The easiest way to build and release mobile apps.
fastlane handles tedious tasks so you don’t have to. — Fastlane

It’s been long Fastlane debuted, but many of iOS (and Android) developers don’t use it.

What Fastlane do for me?

Fastlane is an open source platform aimed at simplifying iOS (and Android) deployment, which lets you automate every aspect of your development and release workflow.

Fastlane can do following things for you:

• Automate Screenshots
• Beta Deployment
• App Store Deployment
• Code Signing

All with few lines of commands.

How Fastlane works?

Fastlane combine all CLI commands to perform any task, and make it working with single or few fastlane commands.

For example, While archiving your app, here is how fastlane combines all your archive commands and convert that into single or smaller fastlane command.

Before Fastlane,

xcodebuild clean archive -archivePath build/MyApp \ -scheme MyApp xcodebuild -exportArchive \ 
-exportFormat ipa \ 
-archivePath “build/MyApp.xcarchive” \ 
-exportPath “build/MyApp.ipa” \ 
-exportProvisioningProfile “ProvisioningProfileName”

With Fastlane,

fastlane gym

If you think this is what you are looking for, then let’s get started using it.

Installing Fastlane into macOS system:

• Open Terminal app and do the followings:

Make sure you have the latest version of the Xcode command line tools installed:

xcode-select — install

Install fastlane using following command:

sudo gem install fastlane -NV

Now fastlane is installed into your macOS machine, you can use it in any of your iOS apps.

Refer Fastlane official doc.

Adding Fastlane to your project

Navigate to your iOS (or Android) app and run following command in terminal

fastlane init

Now fastlane will ask for any missing information for setup.

Initial configuration is done, now you can Generate localized iOS screenshots for the App Store, Automatic iOS Beta deployment or Automatic iOS App Store deployment.