Setup Android Gradle based Firebase App Distribution with Github Actions CI
This is a quick guide on how you can easily set up Github Actions CI workflow to automatically post APK to Firebase App Distribution on merge to release or master (or soon to be known as main) branch.
Firebase already has an excellent guide 🏆 on how to set up the Gradle task on your Android project to post APK to App Distribution. However, I will quickly touch those areas using the easiest path ✌️.
PREREQUISITE : You already have Firebase project setup for the app with google-services.json file in your Android app project.
Setup Gradle for the App
On your root build.gradle
file add the Gradle plugin
dependencies {
// .. other existing deps here
classpath 'com.google.firebase:firebase-appdistribution-gradle:2.0.0'
}
Next, apply the plugin in your Android app’s build.gradle
and distribution properties. See the official guide for the full list of supported parameters.
apply plugin: 'com.google.firebase.appdistribution'
android {
buildTypes {
release { // NOTE: `debug` can have different cofigs
firebaseAppDistribution {
releaseNotes="Release notes at bit.ly/notes"
groups="qa" // see docs for more options
}
}
}
}
Generate Firebase Token
Firebase has 3 different documented ways you can authenticate to be able to upload the APK. Generating the token is one of the easiest that I will focus on with snapshot images so that you can easily relate to it.
./gradlew appDistributionLogin
Copy the URL https://accounts.google.com/o/..../auth/cloud-platform and paste it in browser and login with the Google account which has write access to the Firebase project.
Setup Secrets for GitHub CI Workflow
Go to your GitHub project and the FIREBASE_TOKEN
as secret property.
Setup GitHub Actions CI Workflow
Based on git-flow, we want to setup the CI job such that whenever we merge commit to master branch it triggers the release build. You can obviously customize the behavior based on your need.
name: Firebase App Distribution
on:
push:
branches:
- master
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: set up JDK 1.8
uses: actions/setup-java@v1
with:
java-version: 1.8
- name: Firebase App Distribute
env:
FIREBASE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.FIREBASE_TOKEN }}
run: ./gradlew assembleRelease appDistributionUploadRelease
That’s it, you should have a working GitHub workflow that automatically sends APK to Firebase App Distribution as soon as there is a commit on master branch.
See pull-request I made to add support for this in one of my side projects.
If you find any issues please let me know I will try to help. Good luck đź‘Ť
Additional Resources
- Firebase App Distribution — https://firebase.google.com/docs/app-distribution
- GitHub Actions — https://help.github.com/en/actions
- Pull Request to support Firebase App Distribution — https://github.com/amardeshbd/android-police-brutality-incidents/pull/117/files
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