Chapter 19. Automating Chores with Fastlane
A large number of the things we do during development arenât directly tied to creating the software. Itâs fun to build new features, and (slightly less) fun to squash bugs, but on top of that constructive work are all of the chores that surround it: managing the appâs presence on the App Store, generating and code signing the builds, and deploying the builds to distribution channels. If youâre doing active development, a significant fraction of your time might be taken up with this work.
Fastlane is a collection of tools that automate many of these tasks. Starting life as a set of helper scripts to speed up small tasks, itâs grown into a huge project that can perform extremely sophisticated work in a single step.
Note
Fastlane is not made by Apple. Instead, itâs an open source project thatâs currently owned by Google. The Fastlane developers do a great job of keeping the tools up to date with the latest releases, but if youâre using a prerelease version of Xcode, Fastlane might not support your environment. Fastlane isnât the only way to do the sorts of tasks weâll talk about, but it is in our opinion the best way. Appleâs Xcode Server, which has a large amount of feature overlap with Fastlane, is worth checking out if Fastlane isnât what you are after.
In this chapter, weâll introduce the Fastlane tools and walk through the process of installing and using them. Along the way, weâll talk about what theyâre ...
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