Fastlane for Android Developers

A quick way to automate gradle scripts when developing apps using android is using fastlane. while not the Most widely used tool in town it’s the new trend. With projects like flutter adopting it into their own documents and by extension Google.

Not only that, but the automation of delivery makes this tools super darn good.

in this short blog we shall create a script to build an app. And in the next one we might deliver that automatically to google play store in the form of a draft.

Preparing Fastlane

To start things off, we shall create in the root of our project a new file called Gemfile, and inside that we add fastlane via

source "https://rubygems.org"
​
gem "fastlane"

Creating the scripts

We simply create a folder named Fastlane and inside that folder we create a file named Fastfile, in it we write:

default_platform(:android)
platform :android do
  desc "Submit a new build to alpha Track on Play"
  lane :alpha do
      # We can create a debug
    gradle(
      gradle_path: "/usr/bin/gradle",
      task: "assemble",
      build_type: 'Debug'
    )
      # Or a profile APK
    gradle(
      gradle_path: "/usr/bin/gradle",
      task: "assemble",
      build_type: 'Profile'
    )
      # Or a release APK
    gradle(
      gradle_path: "/usr/bin/gradle",
      task: "assemble",
      build_type: 'Release'
    )
  end
end

And that’s all folks.