Before you can publish an app on Google Play or any other app store, you need to sign it with a private key. If you have a paid and free version or different apps for different clients, you need to sign every flavor with a different key. This is where signing configurations come in handy.

Signing configurations can be defined like this:

android {
    signingConfigs {
        staging.initWith(signingConfigs.debug)

        release {
            storeFile file("release.keystore")
            storePassword"secretpassword"
            keyAlias "gradleforandroid"
            keyPassword "secretpassword"
        }
    }
}

In this example, we create two different signing configurations.

The debug configuration is automatically set up by the Android plugin and makes use of a general keystore with a known password, so it is not necessary to create a signing configuration for this build type.

The staging configuration in the example uses initWith(), which copies all properties from...