What is fastlane

Fastlane is a continuous delivery tool for iOS and android apps. It started of as just an iOS delivery tool and therefore offers a much richer set of functionality for iOS apps.

Fastlane itself is written in ruby and can be installed using ruby gems

$ gem install fastlane

It is however recommended that you include fastlane as a dependency in your Gemfile.

To learn more about fastlane check out their repo.

Actions

Actions can be thought of as build steps. Each step is an individual task that can be performed in order to achieve a goal. Examples of some common actions are

• increment build number
• build
• test
• upload to hockey

Fastlane contains a whole heap of built in actions to help us, to see the entire list enter the following into the command line

$ fastlane actions

To see information on a single action such as input parameters and return values enter the following into the command line

$ fastlane action 'ACTION_NAME'

If an we need some functionality that does not have a predefined action we can even create our own.

Lanes

A lane is a collection of actions. It is helpful to think of lanes as workflows. lanes are named and when we run fastlane we input a lane to run. Fastlane will then execute each action defined in the lane in order failing if any step doesn't execute properly. Lanes are defined as follows

#!ruby
lane :hockey_upload do       # Defining a lane named hockey_upload
  scan                       # Fastlane action that runs all unit tests
  gym                        # Fastlane action that builds and archives project  
  hockey                     # Fastlane action that uploads app to hockey
end

We define our lanes in a file known as a Fastfile. This file also contains any helper functions we might need.

Next: Quick simple setup using TAB defaults

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