Automate your Workflow with Fastlane

If you’re an iOS developer, you’ve probably heard of Fastlane before, and if you’ve just happened to search and found this blog, then you knew, Fastlane’s gonna provide you with so many benefits as an iOS developer. Guess what, you’re right!

Take note though, this is not a tutorial but more like a review of my experience with Fastlane, and how it can help you in your development.

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When I heard about Fastlane a year back, it got me so excited, I knew that this is a time-saver. I was always excited about it, and I kept talking about it, but I never got my chance to apply it in my work. Since that time, my team has already had a defined workflow.

Now that I worked as a freelance, I was able to learn stuff that’s really exciting for me, and that’s the time when I dive right away with Fastlane and integrated it into the project that I was working on.

Links:
Fastlane Landing Page
Fastlane Documentation
Fastlane's Github

The beauty of Fastlane, at least for me, is that you can slowly automate your workflow bit by bit. Meaning you can minimize disrupting your entire development workflow. You can progress to a more automated process from your current manual workflow.

How I Progress with Fastlane

I started integrating it on the beta builds to Crashlytics, since it’s a recurring task to send a build to the client, I thought it would be ideal to start there. (You can actually create your first Fastlane with the help of the Fabric app)

And as the process evolved, I figured that I have to maintain a changelog and proper versioning for my builds. I also realized that I have to build also for myself before I build it for the client and have to do different kinds of stuff to clean up the code and the repository. So I added another lane of my workflow or activity in the development cycle. I’ve improved my process bit by bit and referred to this catalog for pre-defined actions in Fastlane. Take note also, there are more developers who are adding more plug-ins in Fastlane. You can also see some example Fastlane implementations here

Once I have improved the build cycles like alpha builds and beta builds. I moved into generating screenshots for App Store and providing the meta information in iTunes Connect. In this way, I'm able to quickly cycle through changes across different languages and images. Actually, this activity is not exciting for me as it's time-consuming and repetitive. But automation and building the tools for automation, got me to be excited in the process again.

Take note, I was not building these tools in one setting, but I built them when I had free time from coding, and it didn't disrupt me towards delivering my code to the client.

The key to being able to create a good workflow in development -- is to be able to document the process.

So it’s really important that we can communicate these tools that we’re building to the team and/or to even the new people who would join the team. So by the time they contribute, they won't start from scratch and direct their focus towards building and improving to a more automated and innovative development. I've implemented this by adding a README.md in my projects' repo and adding a Fastlane Section.