Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

After we complete the development and first deployment of our app, we must think of how to make the process smoother for consecutive deployments, and that’s where Continuous integration/Continuous delivery (CI/CD) comes in.

In this chapter, we will learn how to use GitHub Actions to automate some of the manual tasks, such as deploying new builds to the Google Play Store. We will learn how to run tests on CI/CD pipelines and push builds to the Play Store using GitHub Actions.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Setting up GitHub Actions
• Running lint checks and tests on GitHub Actions
• Deploying to Play Store using GitHub Actions

Technical requirements

To follow the instructions in this chapter, you will need to have Android Studio Hedgehog or later (https://developer.android.com/studio) downloaded.

You can use the previous chapter’s code to follow the instructions in this chapter. You can find the code for this chapter at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Kotlin-for-Android/tree/main/chapterfourteen.

Setting up GitHub Actions

Before we can understand GitHub Actions, we need to understand what CI/CD is. This is a process that allows us to automate the building, testing, and deployment of our code to production. CI/CD not only automates these processes but also integrates them into a single coherent pipeline. This ensures that code changes are more reliable and stable when deployed. The definition should emphasize the role of CI/CD in facilitating frequent and reliable updates. This is an especially important process as it aims to improve the speed, efficiency, and reliability of how we deliver our software.

Benefits of CI/CD

Let’s go through some of the benefits of CI/CD:

• Fast release cycles: CI/CD allows us to release our software faster and more frequently. This is because we are automating the process of building, testing, and deploying our code.
• Increased collaboration: Since a lot of the processes are automated, we can focus on the code and the features...

Running lint checks and tests on GitHub Actions

In Chapter 11, we learned how to run lint checks on our project using shell commands on the terminal. We have also learned how to write tests for our code base. In this section, we are going to run the format, lint checks, and tests on our newly created actions and we will do all of this step by step:

1. First, we will add the ktlintCheck step:

   - name: Run ktlintCheck
     run: ./gradlew ktlintCheck
     working-directory: ./chapterfourteen

   In this code, we have added a step called Run ktlintCheck. This step will run the ktlintCheck command, which will check whether our code is formatted correctly. This step fails if our code is not formatted correctly.

2. Next, we add the detekt step:

   - name: Run detekt
     run: ./gradlew detekt
     working-directory: ./chapterfourteen

   In this step, we run the detekt command, which will run the detekt checks on the code that we set up earlier in Chapter 11. This step fails...

Deploying to Play Store using GitHub Actions

In Chapter 13, we learned how to deploy our app to Google Play Store using Google Play Console. However, in that chapter, we did it manually. In this chapter, we are going to learn how to deploy our app to Google Play Store using GitHub Actions. We are going to use the Google Play Publisher action to deploy our app to Google Play Store. This action is available in GitHub Marketplace.

Before we can write our workflow, we need to do some setup. We need to create a service account on our Google Play Store account. We can do this by following these steps:

1. Configure the service account in Google Cloud Platform by following these steps:
   1. Navigate to https://cloud.google.com/gcp.
   2. Navigate to IAM and admin | Service accounts | Create service account.
   3. Pick a name and add appropriate permissions, for example, owner permissions.
   4. Open the newly created service account, click on the Keys tab, and add a new JSON type key.
   5. When the key is successfully...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to use GitHub Actions to automate some manual tasks, such as deploying new builds to the Play Store. Additionally, we learned how to run lint checks and tests on CI/CD pipelines and push builds to Google Play Store using GitHub Actions.

In the next chapter, we will learn about techniques to improve our apps by adding analytics, using Firebase Crashlytics, and using cloud messaging to increase user engagement in our apps. Additionally, we will learn some tips and tricks for securing our apps.