Deliver - Continuous Deployment for iOS

Updating your iOS app should not be painful and time consuming. Automate the whole process to start with Continuous Deployment.

Deliver can upload ipa files, app screenshots and more to the iTunes Connect backend, which means, you can deploy new iPhone app updates just by using one command.

Follow the developer on Twitter: @KrauseFx

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Features • Installation • Quick Start • Usage • Credentials • Can I trust Deliver? • Tips • Need help?

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Features

• Upload hundreds of screenshots with different languages from different devices
• Upload a new ipa file to iTunes Connect without Xcode from any computer
• Update app metadata
• Easily implement a real Continuous Deployment process
• Store the configuration in git to easily deploy from any computer, including your Continuous Integration server (e.g. Jenkins)
• Get a PDF preview of the fetched metadata before uploading the app metadata and screenshots to Apple: Example Preview (Yes, those are screenshots taken for all screen sizes)

Installation

Install the gem

sudo gem install deliver

Make sure, you have the latest version of the Xcode command line tools installed:

xcode-select --install

Install phantomjs (this is needed to control the iTunes Connect frontend)

brew update && brew install phantomjs

If you don't have homebrew installed already, install it here.

Quick Start

The guide will create all the necessary files for you, using the existing app metadata from iTunes Connect.

• cd [your_project_folder]
• deliver init
• When your app is already in the App Store: y
• Enter your iTunes Connect credentials
• Enter your app identifier
• Enjoy a good drink, while the computer does all the work for you
• When it's a new app: n

Copy your screenshots into the deliver/screenshots/[language] folders (see Available language codes)

From now on, you can run deliver to deploy a new update, or just upload new app metadata and screenshots.

Customize the Deliverfile

Open the Deliverfile using a text editor and customize it even further. Take a look at the following settings:

• ipa: You can either pass a static path to an ipa file, or add your custom build script.
• unit_tests: Uncomment the code to run tests. (e.g. using xctool)

Usage

Why should you have to remember complicated commands and parameters?

Store your configuration in a text file to easily deploy from any computer.

Run deliver init to create a new Deliverfile. You can either let the wizard generate a file based on the metadata from iTunes Connect or create one from a template.

Once you created your configuration, just run deliver.

Here are a few example files:

Upload screenshots to iTunes Connect

app_identifier "net.sunapps.1"
version "1.1"

screenshots_path "./screenshots"

The screenshots folder must include one subfolder per language (see Available language codes)

Upload a new ipa file with a changelog to the App Store

This will submit a new update to Apple

ipa "./latest.ipa"
changelog({
    "en-US" => "This update adds cool new features",
    "de-DE" => "Dieses Update ist super"
})

Implement blocks to run unit tests

unit_tests do
    system("xctool test")
end

success do
    notifier = Slack::Notifier.new("SlackTeam", "SlackToken")
    notifier.ping "Successfully deployed new version"
end

error do |exception|
    # custom exception handling here
    raise "Something went wrong: #{exception}"    
end

For this example I used slack-notifier.

Set a default language if you are lucky enough to only maintain one language

default_language "en-US"
version "1.2"

title "Only English Title"

If you do not pass an ipa file, you have to specify the app version you want to edit.

Update the app's keywords

default_language "de-DE"
version "1.2"

keywords ["keyword1", "something", "else"]

Read content from somewhere external (file, web service, ...)

description({
    "en-US" => File.read("changelog-en.txt")
    "de-DE" => open("http://example.com/latest-changelog.txt").read
})

Build and sign the app

I'm using Shenzhen, but you can use any build tool or custom scripts.

ipa do
    # Add any code you want, like incrementing the build 
    # number or changing the app identifier
  
    system("ipa build") # build your project using Shenzhen
    "./AppName.ipa" # Tell 'Deliver' where it can find the finished ipa file
end

What is the Deliverfile?

As you can see, the Deliverfile is a normal Ruby file, which is executed when running a deployment. Therefore it's possible to fully customise the behaviour on a deployment.

All available commands with a short description can be found in the wiki.

Some examples:

• Run your own unit tests or integration tests before a deploy (recommended)
• Ask the script user for a changelog
• Deploy a new version just by starting a Jenkins job
• Post the deployment status on Slack
• Upload the latest screenshots on your server
• Many more things, be creative and let me know :)

Use the exposed Ruby classes

Some examples:

require 'deliver'

app = Deliver::App.new(app_identifier: 'at.felixkrause.app')

app.get_app_status # => Waiting for Review
app.create_new_version!("1.4")
app.metadata.update_title({ "en-US" => "iPhone App Title" })
app.metadata.set_all_screenshots_from_path("./screenshots")
app.upload_metadata!
app.itc.submit_for_review!(app)

Deliver::ItunesSearchApi.fetch_by_identifier("net.sunapps.15") # => Fetches public metadata

This project is well documented, check it out on Rubydoc.

Credentials

The used username (Apple ID) will be stored in the Deliverfile by default. When you run deliver for the first time on another computer, you will only be asked for the password.

Therefore it is easy to switch between projects, without needing to logout and login again.

Use the Keychain

The first time you use Deliver you have to enter your iTunes Connect credentials. They will be stored in the Keychain.

If you decide to remove your credentials from the Keychain, just open the Keychain Access, select All Items and search for 'deliver'.

Use environment variables

You can use the following environment variables to use a specific account instead of the one stored in the keychain. This is especially important if you have more than one iTunes Connect account in your keychain:

DELIVER_USER
DELIVER_PASSWORD

Implement your custom solution

Take a look at Using the exposed Ruby classes.

Can I trust Deliver?

###How does this thing even work? Is magic involved? 🎩###

Deliver is fully open source, you can take a look at it. It will only modify the content you want to modify using the Deliverfile. Your password will be stored in the Mac OS X keychain, but can also be passed using environment variables.

Before actually uploading anything to iTunes, Deliver will generate a PDF summary of the collected data.

Deliver uses the following techniques under the hood:

• The iTMSTransporter tool is used to fetch the latest app metadata from iTunes Connect and upload the updated app metadata back to Apple. It is also used to upload the ipa file. iTMSTransporter is a command line tool provided by Apple.
• With the iTMSTransporter you cannot create new version on iTunes Connect or actually publish the newly uploaded ipa file. This is why there is some browser scripting involved, using Capybara and Poltergeist.
• The iTunes search API to find missing information about a certain app, like the apple_id when you only pass the bundle_identifier.

Tips

Available language codes

["da-DK", "de-DE", "el-GR", "en-AU", "en-CA", "en-GB", "en-US", "es-ES", "es-MX", "fi-FI", "fr-CA", "fr-FR", "id-ID", "it-IT", "ja-JP", "ko-KR", "ms-MY", "nl-NL", "no-NO", "pt-BR", "pt-PT", "ru-RU", "sv-SE", "th-TH", "tr-TR", "vi-VI", "cmn-Hans", "zh_CN", "cmn-Hant"]

Use a clean status bar

You can use SimulatorStatusMagic to clean up the status bar.

Automatically create screenshots

There is no optimal solution out there (yet).

Some open source tools I found helpful:

• ui-screen-shooter: Makes use of the normal UIAutomation code based on Javascript. The script basically helps you switching the device type and simulator language. It is based on AppleScript.
• rScreenshooter: Similar to ui-screen-shooter, but based on Ruby.
• Subliminal: Write your app interaction (e.g. taps) in Objective C. It is based on UIAutomation and is well documented. Currently there are some issues with the latest release of Xcode, which are partly solved in the Xcode6 branch. Checkout my public gist for running Subliminal on different devices and generating a HTML site viewing all screenshots.

Deliver automatically detects the device type of each screenshot based on its resolution. All you have to do is to group the screenshots by their language. Make sure you use the correct language codes.

Editing the Deliverfile

Change syntax highlighting to Ruby.

In progress

These are features, which are implemented, but not yet fully tested and production ready. You can try it on your own risk.

Distribute an ipa file to your TestFlight beta testers

beta_ipa "./latest.ipa"

This will upload the ipa file to iTunes Connect and mark the uploaded build as Beta build.

Need help?

• If there is a technical problem with Deliver, submit an issue. Run deliver --trace to get the stacktrace.
• I'm available for contract work - drop me an email: deliver@felixkrause.at

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. See the LICENSE file.

Contributing

1. Create an issue to discuss about your idea
2. Fork it (https://github.com/KrauseFx/deliver/fork)
3. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create a new Pull Request