Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment

Learn about CI/CD and the tools to automate the building and deployment of your Flutter applications.

We'll cover the following

What is CI/CD?

Speed and automation are key factors in building and deploying apps. The technique of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment has changed the nature of software development. We can integrate new code into an existing one, perform tests, and release an updated version of the app automatically in less time.

CI/CD stands for continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). Continuous integration involves:

  • Automated build process

  • Automated testing

  • Early detection of issues

Continuous deployment involves:

  • Automated deployment of applications to development, staging, or production environments.

  • Consistent development, testing, and production environments.

  • Easy rollbacks and roll-forwards when switching between app versions.

CI/CD tools

Several CI/CD tools will help us automate the building, testing, and deployment processes. Some of these tools include:

  • Codemagic: It is tailored for mobile development and supports all major mobile platforms.

  • Bitrise: It specializes in mobile development and supports all major mobile platforms.

  • Jenkins: It is one of the oldest and most popular CI/CD tools. It includes support for Android and iOS SDKs.

  • App Center: It supports apps built for every platform.

  • GitLab CI: This is GitLab’s built-in CI/CD tool. It supports both self-hosted and cloud-hosted alternatives for Android and iOS platforms.

  • GitHub Actions: This is GitHub’s CI/CD tool. It supports Android and iOS applications.

We will learn to use Codemagic to build, test, codesign, and publish an Android version of our Flutter app to the Google Play Store.

Codemagic

Codemagic is a CI/CD tool for mobile app projects. It automatically handles all the builds, tests, and releases for us. Its repository integration helps us connect with the Git provider that hosts our Flutter app. We can then set up a workflow for developing, testing, and releasing our app. 

The image below illustrates the workflow for publishing Flutter apps to Google Play using Codemagic. First, the Flutter project is set up on version control. Then, Codemagic is configured to build the Flutter project and generate release files, which are then published to Google Play for distribution.

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