Continuous integration and delivery for mobile apps through Node.js

Shi Chen works at Butterscotch Shenanigans, a 5 person independent video game studio based in St Louis (in fact, it is in the very CET building). Ever since its hit game Crashlands debuted on Google Play, Apple App Store, and Steam (for Windows and MacOS) in January 2016, the studio has been adapting to the increasing needs of delivering the game and content updates to multiple distribution stores with cross-platform support. Shi develops and maintains the continuous integration tools to help Butterscotch to do just that.

Developing mobile apps can be a fun and creative challenge, but waiting for the code to compile from the IDE and uploading the binary package to the store can be a monotonous chore, or even a frustrating experience if you messed up the configs, uploaded the wrong build, or had to deliver multiple updates. The good news is that most modern IDEs have command-line interfaces that allow automation of compiling, and most store backends have APIs that allows the automation of uploading. In this talk, we will go over the design of a NodeJS setup that automates such compiling and uploading tasks, and look at an example that mainly uses the Child Process and Request library, an Express server, and web hooks so that it can detect code changes on a remote repository, compile the binary package for an Android app, and upload it to GooglePlay.