Appcenter: Fastlane build support

[philjoseph]

Describe the solution you'd like
I have a mobile, react-native application with multiple Android flavors and iOS configurations. I would like to customize the way I build it and love to use fastlane to setup highly efficient build systems. This way I can automate multiple flavor builds and test, publish actions.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Competitive CI that do offer more customization in term of build. Bitrise and others.

Additional context
Today AppCenter is detecting by itself the app is react-native, and does not allow custom definition of the build system. it is not flexible enough for complex workflows.

[patniko]

Hi @philjoseph - mind elaborating a bit more on how you see this working? We do have a fastlane plugin available so you can distribute to App Center, but it sounds like you are hinting towards something else.

[philjoseph]

I am aware of the fastlane plugin that is useful when building locally and distributing via AppCenter. I am interested to build my apps in App Center and the build process is not trivial since I want to build multiple flavors (Android) and configurations (iOS).

The idea is to have fastlane as an option to build react-native apps and all we will have to do is to define the platform and the lane to build through a drop down. You will have to maintain the fastlane cli on the build machines, that should not be a too complex task.

I believe that sophisticated projects must use more than react-native CLI, and fastlane is one of the best automation tool for mobile app in the open source world. This is the way to build both locally and with CI systems and this is the way to customise properly complex tasks through a one very well maintained automation tool.

[markymc]

One thing I was wondering is if you can just setup a post build script to run your Fastlane builds? Then you could benefit from the automated builds, testing etc, but have your Testflight builds etc handled by Fastlane. Would that work?

[philjoseph]

This is part of the benefit of fastlane, you can add whatever you want pre and post build, you're in full control. As an example see here a new great fastlane plugin that can make life much easier.

@nrajpurkar Do you have any update to share ?

[nilofer]

@philjoseph no update to share on this front, but definitely keeping this issue open to hear more from the community about how this would benefit workflows.

[alex-mcleod]

I'm also keen on this — Would love to be able to change the build script that Appcenter runs so that I can use Appcenter / Fastlane to build a version of our app which will run on simulators. Would also like to use Fastlane for distribution, because it automates the entire app build / release process.

[gchen-psi]

+1 for distribution purposes. Automating provisioning/certification of iOS apps using Fastlane saves us a ton of hassle and maintenance. It's the only reason we still use Bitrise + HockeyApp.

[philjoseph]

I am about to select a CI / CD for a new react-native app and this lacking feature of fastlane build is one of my major criteria. Any decisions from the AppCenter team ?
I am considering NeverCode, Travis, and CircleCi, but since i was using HockeyApp for iOS adhoc distribution I would love to stay with AppCenter

[nilofer]

@philjoseph no update from our side on this at the moment

[gadu]

fastlane builds would also indirectly unblock support for caching dependencies (https://github.com/microsoft/appcenter/issues/442) since there are a variety of caching plugins available for fastlane already (https://docs.fastlane.tools/plugins/available-plugins/)

[gryz]

No conclusion or update?

[cruinh]

I'm also looking for this so that my team can create builds locally in exactly the same way that AppCenter would in the cloud. Or as close as possible to that. And so we can create a single build script that's used in both places.

[JulianKingman]

We currently use Fastlane to configure builds with multiple variations of the same app. Even just having Fastlane available in the build scripts to just run configuration changes would be super helpful. Is there a way to do this now? Like can Fastlane be downloaded and run in those scripts, or would that fail?

edit: yes, fastlane can be installed and used to configure builds

[ferdicus]

Hi @philjoseph - mind elaborating a bit more on how you see this working? We do have a fastlane plugin available so you can distribute to App Center, but it sounds like you are hinting towards something else.

kind of takes away one of the goodies of using AppCenter: building on it
also, doesn't seem to be actively maintained anymore...

[msftbot[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had any activity for 60 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 15 days of this comment.

[0xced]

Dear bot, lack of activity doesn't mean people have given up on the idea to have fastlane support in AppCenter.
Please don't automatically close this issue and let a human tell us whether we should keep hope in this feature or not.