To summarize the questions we will answer in this story.

• How to Build and Sign release build?
• How to set environment variables via workflow which are being used inside gradle file?
• How to create/upload release and tag over Github?
• How to retrieve Version Name from app gradle file and use it inside workflow for tag and release name?

This is the 2nd story in the series about Github Actions. The first story explains basics about Github Actions and creating an Android Lint workflow, you can read the story from the link below.

👉 Android Lint workflow using Github Actions

This story expects some basic understanding about Github Actions. If you are not familiar with Github Actions, you can read the previous blog post about Github Actions.

In this story we will need to store some sensitive information to use inside Github workflows . Github recommends storing such information via Github secrets, so before moving forward let’s see what is Github secrets.

Github Secrets.

Github Secrets allows you to store sensitive information inside your Github organisation, repository or repository environment.

High level points about Github secrets

• Github Secrets store information in Key/Value pairs.
• You can provide Github Secrets at organisation, repository and environment level.
• Same key in environment will have precedence over repository and repository key/value secret will have precedence over organisational level Github secrets.
• Github Secrets are directly accessible in side Github Workflows

We will be using repository level Github Secrets. Following are steps to create repository level Github Secrets,

1. Navigate to the Settings of the particular repository.
2. Inside the Security section on the left side, click on Secrets and Variables .
3. From the drop-down click on Actions, this will open Github Secrets view where you can see the option New Repository Secret to create secrets.

To read more about creating Github Secrets you can read from official documentation.

Let’s see the process now

1. Generate Release Signing key and keystore

In order to build and sign a release version of the App we need to have Release Keystore, username, password and alias. If you have not created before you can use the official documentation to create.

2. Encode keystore(.jks file)

Once keystore, username, password and alias are created for release signing, we want to store all this sensitive information in Github Secrets and access them inside workflows directly from Github Secrets.

This way we don’t need to store such information directly inside Github repo which will be a problem if its public Github repo even if its not public repository its better to use Github Secrets.

Keystore is a file with extension (.jks), in order to store it on Github Secrets we will base64 encode it and the resulting base64 string will be stored inside Github Secrets .

To encode the file we can use the following command

base64 -i <in-file> -o <outfile>

After performing the base64 encoding the resulting file will be txt file.

e.g

base64 -i /Development/release-keys/release-keystore.jks -o /Development/release-keys/release-keystore-base64.txt

android {
    signingConfigs {
        release {
            storeFile file("keystore.jks")
            storePassword System.getenv("RELEASE_SIGNING_PASSWORD")
            keyPassword System.getenv("RELEASE_SIGNING_PASSWORD")
            keyAlias System.getenv("RELEASE_SIGNING_ALIAS")
        }
    }

In signingConfigs for release build, we are setting storePassword , keyPassword and keyAlias from environment variable that we will set via our Github workflow which we will create in next steps.

5. Github workflows

Everything is available to create Github workflow.

5.1 Trigger Event

We want to trigger the workflow whenever code is pushed to the main branch.

Using softprops Github Action to achieve that. ${{env.version_name}} is the environment variable used to get the versionName configured in the previous step.

For the bundle file path please specify YourAppName and YourAppNameWithVariant , you can check when you create a normal build from Android Studio.

Workflow run overview.

Let’s see the workflow execution logs

Tag and Release over Github

Below is the view from the Release and Tag section from Github, after this workflow executed successfully.

That’s it for now, I hope you liked it.

💡 In the next story I will show how to keep Version code updated using workflow.

Remember to follow and 👏 if you like it 🙂

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