Use Travis to extract testing APKs for PSLab

Travis CI is a popular continuous integration tool built to test software and deployments done at GitHub repositories. They provide free plans to open source projects. PSLab Android is using Travis to ensure that all the pull requests made and the merges are build-bug frees. Travis can do this pretty well, but that is not all it can do. It’s a powerful tool and we can think of it as a virtual machine (with high specs) installed in a server for us to utilize efficiently.

There was a need in PSLab development that, if we want to test the functionalities of code at a branch. To fulfil this need, one has to download the branch to his local machine and use gradle to build a new apk. This is a tedious task, not to mention reviewers, even developers wouldn’t like to do this.

If the apk files were generated and in a branch, we can simply download them using a console command.

$ wget https://raw.github.com/fossasia/<repository>/<branch>/<file with extension>

 

With the help of Travis integration, we can create a simple script to generate these apks for us. This is done as follows;

Once the Travis build is complete for a triggering event such as a pull request, it will run it’s “after_success” block. We are going to execute a script at this point. Simply add the following code snippet.

after_success:
  - 'if [ "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" == "false" ]; then bash <script-name>.sh; fi'

 

This will run the script you have mentioned using bash. Here we will have the following code snippets in the specified bash script.

First of all we have to define the branch we want to build. This can be done using a variable assignment.

export DEVELOPMENT_BRANCH=${DEVELOPMENT_BRANCH:-development}

 

Once the build is complete, there will be new folders in the virtual machine. One of them is the app folder. Inside this folder contains the build folder where all the apk files are generated. So the next step is to copy these apk files to a place of our preference. I am using a folder named apk to make it much sense.

cd apk
\cp -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/*/**.apk .
\cp -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/debug/output.json debug-output.json
\cp -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/release/output.json release-output.json
\cp -r ../README.md .

 

Usually, the build folder has following apk files

  • app-debug.apk
  • app-release-unsigned.apk
  • app-release.apk

Release apks are usually signed with a key and it would cause issues while installation. So we have to filter out the debug apk that we usually use for debugging and get it as the output apk. This involves simple file handling operations in Linux and a bit of git.

First of all, rename the apk file so that it will be different from other files.

# Rename apks with dev prefixes
mv app-debug.apk app-dev-debug.apk

 

Then add and commit them to a specific branch where we want the output from.

git add -A
git commit -am "Travis build pushed [development]"
git push origin apk --force --quiet> /dev/null

 

Once it is all done, you will have a branch created and updated with the apk files you have defined.

 

Figure 1: UI of pslab-android apk branch

Reference:

  1. https://travis-ci.org/
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apt-get update in building Meilix through Travis

Meilix uses Travis to build and then make a github release of the ISO. There are packages that get built in the script executed by Travis.

What problem it is solving? It’s the need of apt-get update which are:

  • Update of the system to support for the newest builds.
  • Adding of the repo after adding a Personal Package Archives (‘PPAs’)

By default, Travis disabled apt-get update for every build. So if we want to run it automatically for each build, we can do it in two different ways.

Way 1:Running apt-get update in before_install step.

Implementation in .travis.yml of Meilix

print 'hello world!'
sudo: required

before_install:
  - apt-get update

 

We already used sudo so there is no need to use sudo in the apt-get update.

This is the most simplistic approach and it update the system packages and source list before installing any packages.

Way 2: executing apt-get update in Travis through APT addon.

The addon comes under the include step and the lint follows this order:

include:
  - os: linux
    addons:
      apt:
        update: true
        sources:
          - ubuntu-toolchain-r-test
        packages:
          - debootstrap
          - genisoimage
          - p7zip-full
          - squashfs-tools
          - ubuntu-dev-tools
          - dpkg-dev
          - debhelper
          - fakeroot
          - devscripts

 

This is helpful in case when we don’t have the before_install step. Additionally, it allows us to specify the packages we need to install.

Choosing between the two options

One can adopt any of the above process to implement apt-update in Travis.

Meilix uses the second approach as because we don’t have before_install parameter.

Sometimes we need some commands to get executed before updating the system, so in that case we prefer before_install to prioritize the tasks.

Resources:

 

 

Continue Readingapt-get update in building Meilix through Travis

Creating an apk in the apk branch using Travis CI

All Android apps in FOSSASIA have an apk branch where after a pull request is merged a new apk gets created so that even people who do not know how to setup the app locally can access it. Let’s see how it is done.

Lets get started

Create a bash file in the scripts folder and name it upload-apk.sh

Here is all the code that you require to create an apk in the apk branch.

First thing that we need to do is setup git. So we’ll set the user name and email just like we do when we setup git for the first time in our own systems.

git config --global user.name "Travis CI"
git config --global user.email "noreply+travis@fossasia.org"

 

Next we will clone the apk branch of the repository and copy all the files that we need ie the apk and the JSON files.

git clone --quiet --branch=apk https://fossasia:$GITHUB_API_KEY@github.com/fossasia/open-event-android apk > /dev/null
cd apk
\cp -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/*/**.apk .
\cp -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/debug/output.json debug-output.json
\cp -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/release/output.json release-output.json

 

Next we will create a new branch that contains only the latest apk. After that we will add the APK and then commit all those changes. You can see that the current date and time are printed out in the commit message.

git checkout --orphan temporary

git add --all .
git commit -am "[Auto] Update Test Apk ($(date +%Y-%m-%d.%H:%M:%S))"

 

We will delete the current apk branch and then rename the current branch to apk. In the end we will force push to origin since histories are unrelated.

git branch -D apk
git branch -m apk

git push origin apk --force --quiet > /dev/null

 

If you have already integrated Travis CI in your repository then you just need to add this line your travis.yml file.

after_success:
- bash scripts/update-apk.sh

 

Now every time a PR gets merged in the repository a new apk file is created in the apk branch of your repository.

Resources

  1. Travis CLI – https://github.com/travis-ci/travis.rb#readme
  2. Travis official documentation – https://travis-ci.org/
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Adding Features into Meilix Generator Webapp

Meilix Generator is a webapp generated in FOSSASIA which takes input from user and send it to Meilix to trigger a build. Then a release is made whose link is emailed to the user. The webapp contains a form where there are fields for installing a particular packages, etc. In the following we will discuss about the ways to achieve the configurations in Meilix ISO without even touching the Meilix repo.

For adding an option in the webapp:

Editing the frontend

We need to edit this line in the index.html with this line:

<input name = "GENERATOR_package_vlc" type = "checkbox" value = "vlc" id = "vlc">

 

Making the script

Then we have to add a script in the script folder. This script is called by Meilix build script. This script contains the variable “GENERATOR_package_vlc”.

We name this file vlc-package.sh

Content:

#!/bin/bash
if echo "$GENERATOR_package_vlc" | grep -q vlc; then 
sudo apt-get install -q -y vlc; fi

 

Line 2 checks that the vlc is checked in the checkbox or not, if it is checked then the other next line gets executed otherwise not.

Calling the script from Meilix (needs to be done only once)

We will add a line in the Meililx build script to call those script present in the Meilix Generator repo.

SCRIPT_URL=https://www.github.com/fossasia/meilix-generator/archive/master.zip
wget -O $scripts.zip $SCRIPT_URL
unzip scripts.zip
SCRIPTS_FOLDER_IN_ZIP="meilix-generator-master/scripts"
ls $SCRIPTS_FOLDER_IN_ZIP; do
$SCRIPTS_FOLDER_IN_ZIP/script; done			#execute all scripts

 

Setting the URL via travis build config post to get all the values starting with GENERATOR_

GENERATOR_ = request.form['GENERATOR_']

 

So overall the abstract of the idea is:

  1. Getting the variables from html to travis as environment variable
  2. Cloning the meilix repo
  3. Executing all the scripts present.

References:

Request HTTP Python

Online Installation media

 

Continue ReadingAdding Features into Meilix Generator Webapp

Using file.io for Meilix Deployment

Meilix is developed in FOSSASIA and is deployed as a release on Github, but the download speed on GitHub for large files is slow. Alternatively deployment can be done on 3rd party servers. transfer.sh offers a good service for a start, but they only have a reduced storage for heavy usage such as what is required for Meilix. file.io is a good alternative. file.io has API features which can be used in .travis.yml to deploy meilix. For the time being, we are deploying a generator branch to file.io

Changes made in the .travis.yml

We need to edit the .travis.yml to deploy the artifact on file.io

deploy:
provider: script
script: curl -F "file=@/home/travis/$(image_name)" https://file.io
on:
branch: generator

We need to edit the deploy attribute in the travis to get the deployment done in file.io. Query contains the address of the file which needs to be uploaded on file.io. Then the branch name is provided on which deployment needs to be done.

Output:

Travis executes the command to deploy the application.

{"success":true,"key":"5QBEry","link":"https://file.io/5QBEry","expiry":"14 days"}

success: true  the artifact is successfully deployed.

key and link: gives the link from where the ISO can be downloaded.

expiry: tell the number of days after which the ISO will be deleted and by default it is set to 14 days.

We can manually input expiry parameter to declare the expiry time.

script: curl -F "file=@/home/travis/$(image_name)" https://file.io/?expires=1w

This will set the expiry time to seven days. If you set it with w, it will be number of weeks, m will be for number of months, y will be number of years.

file.io solved the most important issue of meilix deployment and this approach can be use several different project of FOSSASIA for the deployment purpose.

References:

Continue ReadingUsing file.io for Meilix Deployment

Auto Deployment of Pull Requests on Susper using Surge Technology

Susper is being improved every day. Following every best practice in the organization, each pull request includes a working demo link of the fix. Currently, the demo link for Susper can be generated by using GitHub pages by running these simple commands – ng build and npm run deploy. Sometimes this process on slow-internet connectivity takes up to 30 mins to generate a working demo link of the fix.

Surge is the technology which publishes or generates the static web-page demo link, which makes it easier for the developer to deploy their web-app. There are a lot of benefits of using surge over generating demo link using GitHub pages:

  • As soon as the pull request passes Travis CI, the deployment link is generated. It has been set up as such, no extra terminal commands will be required.
  • Faster loading compared to deployment link is generated using GitHub pages.

Surge can be used to deploy only static web pages. Static web pages mean websites that contain fixed contents.

To implement the feature of auto-deployment of pull request using surge, one can follow up these steps:

  • Create a pr_deploy.sh file which will be executed during Travis CI testing.
  • The pr_deploy.sh file can be executed after success i.e. when Travis CI passes by using command bash pr_deploy.sh.

The pr_deploy.sh file for Susper looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [ “$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST” == “false” ]; then
echo “Not a PR. Skipping surge deployment.”
exit 0
fi
angular build production

npm i -g surge

export SURGE_LOGIN=test@example.co.in
# Token of a dummy account
export SURGE_TOKEN=d1c28a7a75967cc2b4c852cca0d12206

export DEPLOY_DOMAIN=https://pr-${TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST}-fossasia-susper.surge.sh
surge project ./dist domain $DEPLOY_DOMAIN;

 

Once pr_deploy.sh file has been created, execute the file in the travis.yml by using command bash pr_deploy.sh.

In this way, we have integrated the surge technology for auto-deployment of the pull requests in Susper.

References:

Continue ReadingAuto Deployment of Pull Requests on Susper using Surge Technology

Deployment terms in Open Event Frontend

In Open Event Frontend, once a pull request is opened, we see some tests running on for the specific pull request like ‘Codacy’, ‘Codecov’, ‘Travis’, etc. New contributors eventually get confused what the tests are about. So this blog would be a walkthrough to these terms that we use and what they mean about the PR.

Travis: Everytime you make a pull request, you will see this test running and in some time giving the output whether the test passed or failed. Travis is the continuous integration test that we are using to test that the changes that the pull request you proposed does not break any other things. Sometimes you will see the following message which indicates that your changes is breaking something else which is not intended.

Thus, by looking at the Travis logs, you can see where the changes proposed in the pull request are breaking things. Thus, you can go ahead and correct the code and push again to run the Travis build until it passes.

Codacy: Codacy is being used to check the code style, duplication, complexity and coverage, etc. When you create a pull request or update the pull request, this test runs which checks whether the code followed certain style guide or if there is duplication in code, etc. For instance let’s say if your code has a html page in which a tag has an attribute which is left undefined. Then codacy will be throwing error failing the tests. Thus you need to see the logs and go correct the bug in code. The following message shows that the codacy test has passed.

Codecov:

Codecov is a code coverage test which indicates how much of the code change that is proposed in the pull request is actually executed. Consider out of the 100 lines of code that you wrote, only 80 lines is being actually executed and rest is not, then the code coverage decreases. The following indicates the codecov report.

Thus, it can be seen that which files are affected by what percent.

Surge:

The surge link is nothing but the deployment link of the changes in your pull request.

Thus, checking the link manually, we can test the behavior of the app in terms of UI/UX or the other features that the pull request adds.

References:

 

 

Continue ReadingDeployment terms in Open Event Frontend

Speeding up the Travis Build to Decrease the Building Time

Meilix is the repository which uses build script to generate community version of lubuntu as LXQT Desktop. It usually takes around 25-26 to build and deploy the ISO as a Github Release on master branch.
Observing the build log we can see that there are most of the packages like debootstrap, squashfs-tool, etc which are being fetch and setup at the time of building which results in increasing build time.

The issue is to decrease the build time supplying the packages from Travis so that when we run build.sh we won’t be required to download them again and thus few minutes will get reduced.
We included list of packages to be pre-downloaded in .travis.yml

include:
  - os: linux
    addons:
      apt:
        sources:
          - ubuntu-toolchain-r-test
        packages:
          - debootstrap
          - genisoimage
          - p7zip-full
          - squashfs-tools
          - ubuntu-dev-tools
          - dpkg-dev
          - debhelper
          - fakeroot
          - devscripts

These are some important packages included in the build.sh  as devtools=”debootstrap genisoimage p7zip-full squashfs-tools ubuntu-dev-tools” which are always fetched, so we included it into .travis.yml and downloaded it before entering into the chroot environment. By specifying those packages in the .travis.yml, Travis provides those packages beforehand into the docker container so it will run our script. Since the scripts also include package then when the script runs apt-get it won’t download those packages again. They are specified outside the chroot environment because they are expected to be at the system the build.sh script is run to get the iso. By this way, we get a sharp decrease in build time as the internet in the Travis CI container is not so fast so the package download time can be avoided. Now the build is taking around 15-16 minutes to build and deploy.

One thing to note that we didn’t remove those packages off build.sh so that build.sh works outside Travis CI as well.

References:
Pull #176 by @abishekvashok
Speeding up Travis Build by Travis CI
Faster Build by atchai.com

Continue ReadingSpeeding up the Travis Build to Decrease the Building Time

Automatic Signing and Publishing of Android Apps from Travis

As I discussed about preparing the apps in Play Store for automatic deployment and Google App Signing in previous blogs, in this blog, I’ll talk about how to use Travis Ci to automatically sign and publish the apps using fastlane, as well as how to upload sensitive information like signing keys and publishing JSON to the Open Source repository. This method will be used to publish the following Android Apps:

Current Project Structure

The example project I have used to set up the process has the following structure:

It’s a normal Android Project with some .travis.yml and some additional bash scripts in scripts folder. The update-apk.sh file is standard app build and repo push file found in FOSSASIA projects. The process used to develop it is documented in previous blogs. First, we’ll see how to upload our keys to the repo after encrypting them.

Encrypting keys using Travis

Travis provides a very nice documentation on encrypting files containing sensitive information, but a crucial information is buried below the page. As you’d normally want to upload two things to the repo – the app signing key, and API JSON file for release manager API of Google Play for Fastlane, you can’t do it separately by using standard file encryption command for travis as it will override the previous encrypted file’s secret. In order to do so, you need to create a tarball of all the files that need to be encrypted and encrypt that tar instead. Along with this, before you need to use the file, you’ll have to decrypt in in the travis build and also uncompress it for use.

So, first install Travis CLI tool and login using travis login (You should have right access to the repo and Travis CI in order to encrypt the files for it)

Then add the signing key and fastlane json in the scripts folder. Let’s assume the names of the files are key.jks and fastlane.json

Then, go to scripts folder and run this command to create a tar of these files:

tar cvf secrets.tar fastlane.json key.jks

 

secrets.tar will be created in the folder. Now, run this command to encrypt the file

travis encrypt-file secrets.tar

 

A new file secrets.tar.enc will be created in the folder. Now delete the original files and secrets tar so they do not get added to the repo by mistake. The output log will show the the command for decryption of the file to be added to the .travis.yml file.

Decrypting keys using Travis

But if we add it there, the keys will be decrypted for each commit on each branch. We want it to happen only for master branch as we only require publishing from that branch. So, we’ll create a bash script prep-key.sh for the task with following content

#!/bin/sh
set -e

export DEPLOY_BRANCH=${DEPLOY_BRANCH:-master}

if [ "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" != "false" -o "$TRAVIS_REPO_SLUG" != "iamareebjamal/android-test-fastlane" -o "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" != "$DEPLOY_BRANCH" ]; then
    echo "We decrypt key only for pushes to the master branch and not PRs. So, skip."
    exit 0
fi

openssl aes-256-cbc -K $encrypted_4dd7_key -iv $encrypted_4dd7_iv -in ./scripts/secrets.tar.enc -out ./scripts/secrets.tar -d
tar xvf ./scripts/secrets.tar -C scripts/

 

Of course, you’ll have to change the commands and arguments according to your need and repo. Specially, the decryption command keys ID

The script checks if the repo and branch are correct, and the commit is not of a PR, then decrypts the file and extracts them in appropriate directory

Before signing the app, you’ll need to store the keystore password, alias and key password in Travis Environment Variables. Once you have done that, you can proceed to signing the app. I’ll assume the variable names to be $STORE_PASS, $ALIAS and $KEY_PASS respectively

Signing App

Now, come to the part in upload-apk.sh script where you have the unsigned release app built. Let’s assume its name is app-release-unsigned.apk.Then run this command to sign it

cp app-release-unsigned.apk app-release-unaligned.apk
jarsigner -verbose -tsa http://timestamp.comodoca.com/rfc3161 -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore ../scripts/key.jks -storepass $STORE_PASS -keypass $KEY_PASS app-release-unaligned.apk $ALIAS

 

Then run this command to zipalign the app

${ANDROID_HOME}/build-tools/25.0.2/zipalign -v -p 4 app-release-unaligned.apk app-release.apk

 

Remember that the build tools version should be the same as the one specified in .travis.yml

This will create an apk named app-release.apk

Publishing App

This is the easiest step. First install fastlane using this command

gem install fastlane

 

Then run this command to publish the app to alpha channel on Play Store

fastlane supply --apk app-release.apk --track alpha --json_key ../scripts/fastlane.json --package_name com.iamareebjamal.fastlane

 

You can always configure the arguments according to your need. Also notice that you have to provide the package name for Fastlane to know which app to update. This can also be stored as an environment variable.

This is all for this blog, you can read more about travis CLI, fastlane features and signing process in these links below:

Continue ReadingAutomatic Signing and Publishing of Android Apps from Travis