No matter the project or stack we strive to automate the testing and deployment pipeline as much as possible. Mobile applications are no different, but do come with their own set of challenges between iOS and Android. We are happy to have a fully automated solution for both platforms that pieces together several fastlane tools to achieve an elegant solution.
We can share how all these pieces fit together to create a robust mobile app pipeline.
As our pipelines evolved to support many different environments we felt we needed a bit more automation around our alpha builds. Builds past alpha were generally tagged releases with human written changelogs, but alpha builds were bleeding edge right from our main branch for internal use. We wanted to provide testers with a bit more context on what changed in each build without them needing to go hunt for information.
This is our journey of a bit of automation to plug into Firebase App Distribution to provide automatic changelogs for our builds.
One day our iOS fastlane repository responsible for automatically renewing provisioning profiles and certificates started failing. We utilize match which was affected by this removal causing our provisioning profiles to not renew and thus application builds to fail. The error was suggesting that Apple was removing a parameter we depended on.
The provided entity includes an unknown attribute - 'templateName' is not an attribute on the resource 'profiles' - /data/attributes/templateName
This is our journey of solving it both as a temporary workaround and a long-term solution.
As our application pipeline elevated into ephemeral GitHub Action containers the Fastlane plugin codenamed "badge" we used was showing some age. It depended on a few native dependencies and took a bit of time to install on our runners. We saw this chance to leverage some exciting new technology and produce an alternative.