Posted by: Tarek Ben Driss

And here we are in Part 2. (if you missed the first part, click here)

So, in the first article we prepared our Oreo (the APK file) automatically after pushing the code to GitHub, and we are ready now to deliver it to testers so they can taste/test it ?

First of all, let’s create an account in Firebase and create a new project :

Steps are simple, writing the project name and then click “next” till the final step.

Then, let’s follow Google’s documentation for adding Firebase to your android project, all is here, you can start from “step 3”.

After adding Firebase to your project, wait and refresh the Firebase Console and then click on “App Distribution” -> “Testers and groups” -> “Add group” … Name it “testers” and then, add your email as well as any other person that you want him to get your Oreo.

We also need to install Firebase CLI via this link. Or you can paste this command on your terminal if you are using macOS or Linux :

curl -sL https://firebase.tools | bash

Once the installation is complete, type this command on your cli :

firebase login:ci

You’ll be invited to signin with your gmail and authorize FirebaseCLI to access your Google account. Finally, you’ll receive on your cli something like this :

The token (highlighted in yellow) is important for the next steps, please keep it apart.

Now let’s get the app ID, go back to our project in the Firebase console, and click on Project settings.

Scroll down till you find the App ID:

Now, we are ready to continue our mission, so let’s get back to our android.yml file, before the APK: part, we add this code:

The code is simple, the pipeline will run

bash ./gradlew assembleDebug

and upload the file app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk using wzieba/Firebase-Distribution-Github-Action@v1.2.2 to the testers group.

You can notice that we‘ve put our appId and token that we already have.

Finally, our android.yml will look like this

And now, let’s push a commit and test what we’ve done. We can see in the GitHub Actions pipeline that we have a new job “Upload APK to App Tester”

And we see that the “Upload artifact to Firebase App distribution” is done correctly

In Firebase, under “App Distribution” -> “Releases” we can also see that we have a new version uploaded. 1.0.0 is the versionName and (1) is the versionCode.