Getting started to publish to Play Store

[bpolaszek]

[Newbie inside]

Hi and thanks for your brilliant work! 👋
We are doing our first Capacitor app, and now the time has come to publish it to the stores.
As we are 100% newbies into iOS/Android apps releasing, but a freelance helped us publish it to the Apple App Store thanks to your other GA IOS Build Action.

I thought the Android one would presumably be easier, but there are some key concepts I have to understand.
Currently, I open Android Studio, Build -> Generate Signed Bundle, and I get an .aab once I chose the appropriate KeyStore, unlocked with the appropriate KeyStore password, then chose the appropriate key, unlocked with the appropriate passphrase.
Then I can upload the file manually into Google Play Console.

Now when I want to use your action in order to automate things, I can set the base64 keystore into keystore-content, set the keystore password into keystore-password and choose the appropriate key inside keystore-alias, but where can I set the passphrase of that key? Apart from this, could you give more info about what I'm supposed to fill into json-key-data / where to find that information?

On the Google Play Console side, I noticed that I can download an App signing key certificate and an Upload key certificate - am I supposed to use this somewhere I didn't figure out?

Sorry for bothering, but any help would make my day!

Thanks! 🙏
Ben

[edodusi]

Hey @bpolaszek! Thank you for the compliments!
I'm aware that it can be difficult to use a product that I built for a specific project at my company and then decided to open-source, I will try to help as much as possible.

First of all, the documentation (README) should be updated and we should include instructions for the new Play Store upload feature.
The keystore-password is the password for both the keystore and the alias, you should set the same for both of them: I know that maybe it sounds strange but it's the config I use internally so in this Action it's the same.

The json-key-data is the key that you must download from Google. You have to follow this guide: https://docs.fastlane.tools/getting-started/android/setup/#setting-up-supply and then provide the JSON file to the json-key-data property as a one line string (this is important)

Here, let me show you the integration we are using in a working project, I hope it can help:

    - uses: sparkfabrik/[email protected]
        with:
          build-type: bundle
          increment-build-number: true
          gradle-task: bundleRelease
          package-name: app.bundle.id
          keystore-content: ${{ secrets.KEYSTORE_CONTENT }}
          keystore-password: ${{ secrets.KEYSTORE_PASSWORD }}
          keystore-alias: ${{ secrets.KEYSTORE_ALIAS }}
          json-key-data: ${{ secrets.PLAY_STORE_JSON_KEY_DATA }}
          upload-to-play-store: true
          project-path: android
          output-path: appName-${{ github.sha }}.aab
          browserstack-upload: false

[bpolaszek]

Man, you're fantastic!
I just reused your example, replaced with my own values and it just worked out of the box. 🎉
Workflow completed in less than 3 min.
If there's some online place I could buy you a beer, I owe you one! 🍻

[edodusi]

Glad I could help @bpolaszek!
No need to offer me a beer, this is just my little way to give back after I take so many from other OSS 🙂