Book Image

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

By : Doron Katz
Book Image

Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

By: Doron Katz

Overview of this book

Competitive mobile apps depend strongly on the development team’s ability to deliver successful releases, consistently and often. Although continuous integration took a more mainstream priority among the development industry, companies are starting to realize the importance of continuity beyond integration and testing. This book starts off with a brief introduction to fastlane—a robust command-line tool that enables iOS and Android developers to automate their releasing workflow. The book then explores and guides you through all of its features and utilities; it provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the tool and how to implement them. Themes include setting up and managing your certificates and provisioning and push notification profiles; automating the creation of apps and managing the app metadata on iTunes Connect and the Apple Developer Portal; and building, distributing and publishing your apps to the App Store. You will also learn how to automate the generation of localized screenshots and mesh your continuous delivery workflow into a continuous integration workflow for a more robust setup. By the end of the book, you will gain substantial knowledge on delivering bug free, developer-independent, and stable application release cycle.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
www.PacktPub.com
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

What are provisioning profiles?


As a seasoned developer, you are no doubt quite familiar with provisioning profiles. When you create a new app through Xcode, entering the various project information, Xcode will create the signed team provisioning profiles that will give you the ability to run the app on your devices, as opposed to just on the Xcode simulator.

The anatomy of a provisioning profile is composed of:

  • App ID (such as com.packt.yourapp)
  • Your signing certificate, which was issued by Apple (more on this in the following chapters)
  • List of device UDIDs that are sanctioned to run your app
  • Special entitlements, such as CloudKit, Push Notifications, and HealthKit

Take a look at the following screenshot:

Think of provisioning profiles as a special hall pass, or permission, that Apple grants you to run your apps on your physical iOS devices for development testing purposes; and not just on your device, but distributing your .ipa file across to other testers. Without provisioning profiles, developers...