Getting started with fastlane for iOS

Installing fastlane

Install the latest Xcode command line tools:

xcode-select --install

Install fastlane using

# Using RubyGems
sudo gem install fastlane -NV

# Alternatively using Homebrew
brew install fastlane

Setting up fastlane

Navigate your terminal to your project's directory and run

fastlane init

To have your Fastfile configuration written in Swift (Beta)

fastlane init swift

Swift setup is still in beta. See Fastlane.swift docs for more information.

Depending on what kind of setup you choose, different files will be set up for you. If you chose to download the existing app metadata, you'll end up with new folders that look like this:

The most interesting file is fastlane/Fastfile, which contains all the information that is needed to distribute your app.

What's next?

fastlane created all the required files for you, now you can go ahead and customise it to generate screenshots or to automatically distribute new builds

Set up environment variables

fastlane requires some environment variables set up to run correctly. In particular, having your locale not set to a UTF-8 locale will cause issues with building and uploading your build. In your shell profile add the following lines:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

You can find your shell profile at ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.profile or ~/.zshrc depending on your system.

Use a Gemfile

It is recommended that you use a Gemfile to define your dependency on fastlane. This will clearly define the used fastlane version, and its dependencies, and will also speed up using fastlane.

Create a ./Gemfile in the root directory of your project with the content

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "fastlane"

Run [sudo] bundle update and add both the ./Gemfile and the ./Gemfile.lock to version control
Every time you run fastlane, use bundle exec fastlane [lane]
On your CI, add [sudo] bundle install as your first build step
To update fastlane, just run [sudo] bundle update fastlane