Fastlane for Android — Automate Everything (Part 1)

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Open Knowledge

3 min readMar 15, 2019

As you may know, every time we release or update android app, we have build sign apk and add to store then add description, screenshots, etc. It’s the same things but you have to done every time you release or update your android app.

That’s why Fastlane have come up here. Fastlane have 4 base features:

fastlane - App automation done right

Automate the most time-consuming beta distribution steps including incrementing the build version, code signing…

fastlane.tools

I will Implement it one by one. But before the implementation, let’s start setting up Fastlane first.

Install Fastlane

install the latest Xcode command line tools:

$ xcode-select --install

install fastlane using

RubyGems: $ sudo gem install fastlane -NV
Homebrew: $ brew cask install fastlane

After you have installed Fastlane successfully, add the below lines to your shell profile (typically ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile or (if you are like me) ~/.zshrc).

export PATH="$HOME/.fastlane/bin:PATH"
export LC_ALL=en.US.UTF-8
export LANG=en.US.UTF-8

That’s it about Fastlane installation.

If you are installing via RubyGems you should install Gem first before install Fastlane.

If you are installing via Homebrew, make sure you have installed brew before installing Fastlane.

Note: If you are getting error while installing Fastlane from this blog, you can follow the instruction from the Fastlane official website to make sure it’s all up-to-date.

Setting up Fastlane

Navigate to your project directory then

$ fastlane init

This command is to initialize fastlane to your project and it will require your app package name. Then it will ask for Path to the json secret file but you can skip it first, I’ll explain later on Play Store Deployment section and also skip for Download existing metadata and setup metadata managment.

After finish initialize fastlane, you will see fastlane folder and inside that it has two files:

Appfile: where you put your package name and json secret file
Fastfile: where you write your configuration

These code is auto generated by Fastlane when you initialize fastlane.

Config Walkthrough

Syntax of writing config in fastlane

desc "Your lane description"
lane :your_lane_name do
  ...
  ...
end

As you can see in our Fastfile now have several lane. The first lane is lane :testinside that lane has gradle(task:"test").It mean this lane is going to run unit test for your whole project.

To run it using $ bundle exec fastlane test