General process for handling builds against test/prod environments

Appflow
1

I’m just getting started with Appflow using their lowest tier plan, but in general I’m struggling to conceptually understand something. I get they are serving more expensive customers with their CI/CD functionality where you can change parameters, and I have no problem with that, but what are people doing if you wanted to change some config variables between a test and prod version of their application?

For example, I’m building a Firebase-backed app, and in firebase I have a test project and a production project. Within Ionic you can easily set up the environment object to provide values for each of these pretty easily, but it’s murky for me how to handle that with Capacitor or even Appflow. Any suggestions?

2

What i did is added a second App in App Store and Play Store (for example YourAppName (DEV)) which is only used for testing and never goes live in the store itself. Then you can add a second destination in appflow to build your apps for this app :blush: Distribution is then via testflight and play store internal tests for example

3

Interesting - Do you then have different repositories to power these two pipelines within Appflow? I couldn’t find where you could run a build against anything other than the main branch.

Or how do you control the build so that the resulting binary you’ll send to these two destinations is actually different?

4

if you build manual you can build to every commit including every branch. We use automations but no need for two repositories.

Via a Env Setting and a build script in the app which can handle this we build the app with the according angular profile

5

Ahh, ok I think that’s helping me understand. I am not able to pay for the tier that includes Automations, so I don’t think I have the same options. Thanks for he reply though!

6

Automations are cool, but they don’t bring in new features, you can do that manual as well. What you need are “Environments” where you can set env variables that you can read out in the build script to build either a prod or a dev app

7

Yes, that makes sense and is in line with how I’ve used CI/CD in other domains. I was just really stuck with the limited features of the Appflow “startup” plan cause there just aren’t many options for changing the build based on an environment.