November 2020 Summaries

Flutter and Bitrise are a powerful combination for building, testing, and deploying mobile apps. A new Flutter app was created using `flutter create`, and then committed to a GitHub repository. The app was then added to Bitrise, where it was set up with a default workflow. This workflow included steps such as activating the SSH key, cloning the repository, installing Flutter, caching dependencies, analyzing the project for issues, testing the app, deploying the app to Bitrise.io, and pushing the cached data back to the repository. The workflow also included an Android code signing step, where a keystore was created and uploaded to Bitrise. An iOS code signing step was also set up, which involved registering devices with Apple Developer, creating a development and distribution certificate, and uploading the codesigning files to Bitrise. With these steps complete, the app was successfully built and deployed to Bitrise.io, where it could be downloaded as a signed IPA file.

This article discusses the author's experience with implementing a cloud-based Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) system for their iOS app using Bitrise. The authors initially used on-premise infrastructure, but faced challenges such as maintenance overhead, unstable builds, and lack of elasticity. They migrated to a cloud solution, which provided benefits like reduced maintenance costs, improved build stability, and increased scalability. The transition involved trade-offs, including slightly longer build times, but the authors found it worth it for the overall improvement in their development workflow.