Notes

Managing release notes for Android and iOS apps using Fastlane

Edit on GitHub

Fastlane
2 minutes
fastlane android ios

There are two types of logs that i have been maintaining for my projects

  • The human generated, user friendly release notes that we publish with the app to the marketplaces
  • The human generated, technically detailed CHANGELOG.md file that we commit with the code. This file contains internal references to Jira/Bitbucket/Sentry issues. (I am currently working on making it auto-generated as well based on conventional commits..)

Android

I use Fastlane for release and deployments. It’s a pretty cool tool that originally used to be macOS only but has been made available for Linux and Windows for some time now. For Android and publishing to the Play Console, Fastlane has this plugin called supply which can fetch and update your app’s metadata. This metadata includes your app’s release notes as well as things such as screenshots and short/long description.

Since supply already has a folder structure for release notes, i am going to use that and reference version specific release notes files from here in other areas instead of setting up my own structure.

Fastlane - Supply

  • Default release notes go into default.txt
  • The file(name) for each release should exactly match the versionCode for that release
  • Changelogs are saved in metadata/android/LANG-CODE/changelogs
└── fastlane
    └── metadata
        └── android
            ├── en-US
            │   └── changelogs
            │       ├── default.txt
            │       ├── 100000.txt
            │       └── 100100.txt
            └── fr-FR
                └── changelogs
                    ├── default.txt
                    └── 100100.txt

Fastlane - Firebase

You can either specify a note with release_notes or a file with release_notes_file.

release_notes: "Text of release notes"

release_notes_file: "/path/to/release-notes.txt"

1    firebase_app_distribution(
2      app: ENV["FIREBASE_APP_ID"],
3      testers: ENV["FIREBASE_TESTERS"],
4      groups: ENV['FIREBASE_GROUPS'],
5      # release_notes: ENV['DEFAULT_RELEASE_NOTE'],
6      # release_notes: "Lots of amazing new features to test out!"
7      release_notes_file: "metadata/android/en-GB/changelogs/default.txt"
8    )

1android_version_code = android_get_version_code(
2  gradle_file: "android/app/build.gradle"
3)
4
5# get the path for the relevat release notes file
6release_notes_file_path = File.join('metadata/android/en-GB/changelogs/', android_version_code) # metadata/android/en-GB/changelogs/18

1if File.exist?(release_notes_file_path)
2  puts "file exists"
3else
4  puts "file #{release_notes_file_path} does not exist"
5end

You should really check for the versionCode in your Fastfile and load the relevant file for the release

Related

Browse all topics