It's another fastlane Friday here on LBOC! We've covered a few of the individual fastlane tools so far, but today we'll look at fastlane itself. It gives us a single command that brings together all the various tools in the suite like gym, snapshot, deliver, etc into one streamlined workflow. Let's get started.

We can of course continue to use each of the fastlane tools individually, but using fastlane allows us to use just one tool that connects not only each of the tools in the suite, but also integrates with other third-party tools like CocoaPods and xctool.

fastlane provides a fantastic in-depth Getting Started guide, but to get things going quickly here's the basics:

We'll begin by installing fastlane, this will install all the fastlane tools, including all the ones we've covered here, wrapped into one simple tool.

gem install fastlane

Then, we'll simply run fastlane init in the root directory of our project.

fastlane's setup assistant will ask us a few questions about our app, then it will create all the configuration files for us, where we'll be able to customize each the tools default settings as well as define our “lanes”.

After completing the intial setup process, we can start to customize our new Fastfile (which was created for us automatically). fastlane is built around the concept of “lanes”. Here's one that deploys to the App Store:

lane :appstore do
  increment_build_number
  cocoapods
  snapshot
  sigh
  deliver
  slack
end

We can run all of these tools now, each one after another by simply running fastlane appstore. Nice!

Notice commands like cocoapods and slack are here. These are some of the third-party actions mentioned earlier.

This is where fastlane's awesome community really shines. There's already 120+ actions ready to use for services like s3, slack and crashlytics, as well as commands for things such as bumping the build number, or even collecting input from the user. Neat!

More info about fastlane can be found at git.io/fastlane