The White Glove Treatment: Polishing Your iOS Build with Jenkins

We use continuous integration and delivery systems to help us build apps all the time. Our pull requests trigger builds that we can test, merging them triggers other builds that we can deploy, and so on. What about all of the other tedious tasks involved in development? This talk will cover using Jenkins, fastlane, and other tools as a system to automatically update an iOS app's dependencies—whether you use CocoaPods, Carthage, or the Swift Package Manager—provide inline feedback on pull requests, and manage tedious distribution work. By the end, you'll have tools at your disposal to let Jenkins do the tedious part of app development, letting you take care of what's actually important.

Transcript

1. The White Glove Treatment
   Polishing Your iOS Build with Jenkins
   Jeff Kelley (@SlaunchaMan)
   Abstractions II, August 22nd, 2019
   

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2. The White Glove Treatment
   Polishing Your iOS Build with Jenkins
   Jeff Kelley |
   

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3. The White Glove Treatment
   Polishing Your iOS Build with Jenkins Continuous
   Integration
   Jeff Kelley |
   

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4. The App Development Process
   1. Ideation/Design
   2. Build
   3. Test
   4. Deploy
   Jeff Kelley |
   

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5. Agenda
   Automate Repetitive Tasks
   Manage Long-Running Tasks
   Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
   Control Access to Administrative Actions
   Jenkins image by the Jenkins Project. CC BY-SA 3.0
   

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6. Agenda
   Automate Repetitive Tasks
   Manage Long-Running Tasks
   Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
   Control Access to Administrative Actions
   Jenkins image by the Jenkins Project. CC BY-SA 3.0
   

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7. Automate Repetitive Tasks
   PR Builds
   • Probably the most-run Jenkins job
   • Build the code, run the test suite, deploy build for QA
   • Can have multiple checks that all must pass to merge
   Jeff Kelley |
   

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8. Automate Repetitive Tasks
   PR Builds
   • Probably the most-run Jenkins job
   • Build the code, run the test suite, deploy build for QA
   • Can have multiple checks that all must pass to merge
   Jeff Kelley |
   

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9. Automate Repetitive Tasks
   Pushing New Versions
   • Triggered on a push to master for projects that build libraries
   • Automatically push to CocoaPods, tag Git release, tweet about it, etc.
   Jeff Kelley |
   

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10. Automate Repetitive Tasks
    Dependency Updates
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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11. Automate Repetitive Tasks
    Dependency Updates
    • Stay on top of important security updates
    • Usually only a handful of updates when run daily
    • Prevents large sets of updates when projects get around to it
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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12. Agenda
    Automate Repetitive Tasks
    Manage Long-Running Tasks
    Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
    Control Access to Administrative Actions
    Jenkins image by the Jenkins Project. CC BY-SA 3.0
    

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13. Manage Long-Running
    Tasks
    UI Testing
    UI tests are:
    • Great for regression testing
    • Easy to write with Xcode
    • Extremely fragile
    • Slow
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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14. Manage Long-Running Tasks
    Mutation Testing1
    • Changes your code and sees if your tests fail
    • Runs your test suite after each change
    • Can take many hours
    1 For mutation testing in Swift, use Sean Olszewski’s Muter.
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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15. Manage Long-Running Tasks
    Handling Multiple Simulated Devices
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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16. Agenda
    Automate Repetitive Tasks
    Manage Long-Running Tasks
    Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
    Control Access to Administrative Actions
    Jenkins image by the Jenkins Project. CC BY-SA 3.0
    

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17. Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
    When it’s time to ship, your project has some output
    • iOS: .ipa file or direct App Store submission
    • Android: .apk file or direct Google Play submission
    • Web: Docker images
    How do you know what’s in those builds?
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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18. Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
    fastlane
    Google’s fastlane tool simplifies iOS workflows
    • Build your app and run your tests
    • Submit to Crashlytics, TestFlight, or the App Store
    • Generate screenshots across every combination of device size/language
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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19. Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
    Recently Apple made a change that the required the main Apple ID on your Apple
    Developer to use two-factor authentication.2 Many people complained about Jenkins
    breaking due to this. You should not ever store the password to this account on Jenkins
    or any other CI system. Someone with access to your Jenkins instance could simply add
    this to a build script:
    echo ${JENKINS_APPLE_ID_USERNAME}
    echo ${JENKINS_APPLE_ID_PASSWORD}
    2 Apple uses their own proprietary 2FA solution, so many common products couldn’t solve this problem.
    Jeff Kelley |
    

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20. Agenda
    Automate Repetitive Tasks
    Manage Long-Running Tasks
    Serve as the Authoritative Build Server
    Control Access to Administrative Actions
    Jenkins image by the Jenkins Project. CC BY-SA 3.0
    

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21. Control Access to Administrative Actions
    Taken from apple/swift#26705
    

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22. Thank You!
    Fastlane Template:
    https://github.com/detroit-labs/fastlane-template
    Contact info:
    Jeff Kelley
    Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/SlaunchaMan
    Twitter: @SlaunchaMan
    E-Mail: jeff@detroitlabs.com
    

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