STORE_DESTINATION.md

Store Destination

This tool not only creates multiple deployment variants of your application but it allows you to use a generated fastlane setup, which among other things, allow us to deploy our applications to multiple stores, they being:

• AppStore (dependent on Issue #81)
• TestFlight
• AppCenter
• PlayStore

A real life use case for an application is that the production variant might be deployed to a public store, while a beta variant or similar might be deployed to AppCenter or TestFlight, for example.

In order to support this without major modifications in the generated fastlane setup, we can specify the store destination for each variant directly in variants.yml.

iOS Stores

Specifying the store destination for a variant isn't mandatory. Note that by not specifying or specifying an unsupported store will fallback to AppStore.

AppStore / TestFlight

Deploying to TestFlight or AppStore require authentication to AppStoreConnect.

In order to have this handled automatically in your CI machine, you'll need an Application Specific Password

Find more about it and how to generate yours in: https://docs.fastlane.tools/best-practices/continuous-integration/#application-specific-passwords

AppCenter

Deploying to AppCenter requires an API token, the application's name, owner's name and destination group.

For more information, see Templates/ios/_fastlane/fastlane/parameters/appcenter_params.rb

You should also specify APPCENTER_APP_NAME as a custom property of your variants which destination fastlane.

Example for iOS

Assume we have an iOS project, which production variant (default) should deploy to Apple's AppStore. A beta variant should be deployed to Apple's TestFlight. And an internal enterprise variant of this application (using an enterprise developer account) should be deployed to AppCenter. This could be achieved with the following:

ios:
    xcodeproj: ...
    target:
      ...
    variants:
        default:
            version_name: 0.0.1
            version_number: 1
            store_destination: AppStore
            ...
        beta:
            version_name: 0.0.1
            version_number: 1
            store_destination: TestFlight
            ...
        enterprise_release:
            version_name: 0.0.1
            version_number: 1
            store_destination: AppCenter
            ...

Example for Android

Assume we have an Android project, which production variant (default) should deploy to Google's Playstore. And an internal enterprise variant of this application (using an enterprise developer account) should be deployed to AppCenter. This could be achieved with the following:

android:
    path: ...
    app_name:
      ...
    variants:
        default:
            version_name: 0.0.1
            version_code: 1
            store_destination: PlayStore
            ...
        enterprise_release:
            version_name: 0.0.1
            version_code: 1
            store_destination: AppCenter
            ...

Now, all we have to do is to switch to the correct variant and instruct fastlane to deploy as usual:

variants switch --platform <platformName(iOS or Android)> --variant <value>

fastlane deploy