Learning Swift, 3rd Edition

Chapter 19. Automating Chores with Fastlane

A large number of the things we do during development aren’t directly tied to creating the software. It’s fun to build new features, and (slightly less) fun to squash bugs, but on top of that constructive work are all of the chores that surround it: managing the app’s presence on the App Store, generating and code signing the builds, and deploying the builds to distribution channels. If you’re doing active development, a significant fraction of your time might be taken up with this work.

Fastlane is a collection of tools that automate many of these tasks. Starting life as a set of helper scripts to speed up small tasks, it’s grown into a huge project that can perform extremely sophisticated work in a single step.

Note

Fastlane is not made by Apple. Instead, it’s an open source project that’s currently owned by Google. The Fastlane developers do a great job of keeping the tools up to date with the latest releases, but if you’re using a prerelease version of Xcode, Fastlane might not support your environment. Fastlane isn’t the only way to do the sorts of tasks we’ll talk about, but it is in our opinion the best way. Apple’s Xcode Server, which has a large amount of feature overlap with Fastlane, is worth checking out if Fastlane isn’t what you are after.

In this chapter, we’ll introduce the Fastlane tools and walk through the process of installing and using them. Along the way, we’ll talk about what they’re useful for, and where you ...