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CI/CD

Continous Integration is an important part of our development process. It allows us to move fast and be confident in our code. We use fastlane and CircleCI for the continuous integration.

App Configurations

We maintain 4 different app configurations:

  1. Development - used for the local development only.
  2. QA - used for internal QA testing.
  3. Staging - public Beta testing.
  4. Production - App Store version.

Workflow

CI/CD Workflow consist of several pipelines:

  1. Test Pipeline - each commit in feature/ branch triggers a Test Pipeline. Test pipeline verifies that app can be built and tests successeds.
  2. Automatic Deploy Pipeline - each commit in develop branch triggers an Automatic Deploy Pipeline. This pipeline builds, tests the app, deploys a QA build and bumps build number of the app.
  3. Manual Deploy Pipeline - is triggered manually via API call to our CI provider. CI takes the latest code on develop or master and deploys Staging or Production build accordingly.

How to setup CI/CD for your project?

1. Setup fastlane

fastlane is a shortcut for day-to-day developers tasks. It saves our time by automating the boring things like building and deploying the app or adding a device to the developer profile.

fastlane scripts are written in Ruby. The main file is called Fastfile. Usually Fastfile consists of several lanes. Lane is just a sequence of actions, such as build_ios_app, hockey or slack. For more information refer to the docs.

Basic Setup

The basic Fastfile contains the minimalistic set of lanes, needed to build and deploy a project on a CircleCI. Lane test just builds the project and runs the tests suite. Usually, this lane is run on every push to any branch. Lane deploy is a bit more complicated as it has more steps:

  1. Retrieve certificates using match.
  2. Build the app.
  3. Deploy an app to the HockeyApp
  4. Send a message to the slack channel.

deploy lane is run on every merge to the develop branch.

Advanced Setup

Usually, basic setup is not enough, as we have several application configurations and we deserve to have nice things. In the advanced Fastfile example you can check typical fastlane configuration used in our projects. There are lanes for running tests, deploying Staging and Production builds, helper lanes for syncing provisioning profiles and adding a new iOS device to the developer profile.

Whoa, a lot of Ruby code! Don't be afraid, it's pretty easy to follow. In addition, setting up the fastlane on the project makes you feel like a cool dev-ops 😎

Code signing part is described in the code signing chapter. If you use match there will be no problems, just grant your CI machine SSH access to the certificates repo.

2. Configure the CircleCI

CircleCI uses config.yml file for configuration, which is located in .circleci/config.yml. It's role is to determine which pipeline to use in the given context and to setup the environment for the fastlane execution.

Example

A configuration file example - config.yml. It consists of 4 jobs which represent our CI pipelines:

  • build-and-test - Test Pipeline
  • deploy_qa - Automated Deploy Pipeline
  • deploy_staging and deploy_production - Manual Deploy Pipelines

Workflow triggers

At the very bottom of config.yml lays description of our workflow. It states, that

  • we will run build-and-test job on push to every branch except develop;
  • we will run deploy_qa job on every push to the develop.

To trigger a Manual Deploy Pipeline, you should use a CircleCI API call with required job name and branch to use for build:

curl -u {TOKEN}: \
     -d build_parameters[CIRCLE_JOB]={JOB_NAME} \
     https://circleci.com/api/v1.1/project/github/uptechteam/{PROJECT_NAME}/tree/{BRANCH_NAME}

Please, refer to the config.yml documentation for more information about the structure of the configuration file.

3. PROFIT 🚀

  • we've automated part of our workflow;
  • our code is always buildable and tests are green;
  • the latest executable build is always available to download.