This directory contains the source code for the Firebase App Distribution Gradle Plugin, which allows uploading distributions, enabling access for testers, and adding release notes.

This subproject produces a Gradle Plugin which faciliates the use cases of appdistribution-buildtools for Android apps built with Gradle.

./gradlew :firebase-appdistribution-gradle:publishToMavenLocal

The produced local Maven artifact is "com.google.firebase:firebase-appdistribution-gradle".

To run unit tests, run:

./gradlew :firebase-appdistribution-gradle:test

To run integration tests, run:

./gradlew :firebase-appdistribution-gradle:integrationTest

Integration tests require a valid service account private key, app ID, and project number to be set in local.properties, for example:

firebase.appId=1:1234567890:android:1234567890
firebase.projectNumber=1234567890

Integration tests also require a service-credentials.json file to the firebase-appdistribution-gradle folder. To create that file:

• In the Google cloud dashboard, navigate to IAM & Admin. From IAM & Admin navigate to Service Accounts. In Service Accounts, ensure you have an account that is allowed to run.
  • If you do not, click "Create Service Account", select a name and id of your choosing (e.g., FAD Gradle Tests and fad-gradle-tests), then Select Firebase App Distribution Admin as a permission for the account.
  • Once you have a service account, click it to edit it, then navigate to the "keys" header inside the service account. From there, click "Add key", "Create New Key", and select JSON as the key type. Save this file to your firebase app distribution gradle plugin folder in a name called service-credentials.json

To test manually, add the plugin to your Android project

apply plugin: 'com.google.firebase.appdistribution'

1. Create a PR with the changes, and request a review to submit it to main. Add the changes in the CHANGELOG.md.
2. Once the changes have been submitted to main they will be released along with the next Android SDK release.

Make sure to bump the version of the plugin.

Use the "Make Releases" GitHub Actions workflow (source) to produce maven artifacts. Please refer to the GitHub Actions documentation on how to trigger the workflow manually. The m2repository.zip can be downloaded from the "Artifacts" section on the workflow execution page.

Download the m2repository.zip artifact from GCS. Extract the contents of the zip file to a local directory. In the project-level Gradle file of a test app add the path to the local maven repository to the repositories block and classpath 'com.google.firebase:firebase-appdistribution-gradle:x.y.z' to the dependencies block.

    repositories {
        // ...

        // Add path to gradle plugin local maven repository
        maven {
            url 'file://<path_to_gradle_plugin_maven_repo>'
        }
    }
    dependencies {
        // ...

        // Add the pre version of the Gradle plugin
        classpath 'com.google.firebase:firebase-appdistribution-gradle:x.y.z'
    }

Sync your project and validate by running an app distribution gradle command such as:

./gradlew assembleDebug appDistributionUploadDebug