Microsoft already released a Google Play store extension for Visual Studio Team Services, and they have now widened the functionality to Apple devices. The extension allows users to deploy iOS applications to the store via Team Services and Team Foundation Server
To gain access, developers must be running Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 3 or later. Code for the extension is open source and uses the popular Fastlane tool.
Extension Features
The App Store feature includes two build tasks and a service endpoint to manage store and iTunes credentials. According to senior Microsoft software engineer
- “Upload a build for an existing app to TestFlight for beta testing.
- Upload a build for an existing app along with metadata and screenshots to iTunes Connect.
- Submit your app for review to the Apple App Store.”
She has also created a short video explaining how to set up continuous deployment. The whole process takes only a few minutes and provides detailed logs of the upload process.
Before you begin, you need to manually release at least one version of the app beforehand. You also need to install fastlane tools, which requires Ruby 2.0 or greater. Microsoft recommends installing the latest Xcode command line tools on a MacOS system.
The aforementioned video is provided for you below:
For those without the time or data plan to watch the video, we have also included Microsoft’s quick start guide:
“Once you have created or retrieved credentials for your App Store account, then perform the following steps to automate releasing updates from a VSTS build or release definition:
- Install the App Store extension from the VSTS Marketplace
- Go to your Visual Studio Team Services or TFS project, click on the Build tab, and create a new build definition (the “+” icon) that is hooked up to your project’s appropriate source repo
- Click Add build step… and select the necessary tasks to generate your release assets (e.g. Gulp, Cordova Build)
- Click Add build step… and select App Store Release from the Deploy category
- Configure the App Store Release task with the desired authentication method, the generated IPA file path, and the desired release track.
- Click the Queue Build button or push a change to your configured repo in order to run the newly defined build pipeline
- Your app changes will now be automatically published to the App Store!”
You can view the full blog post on this build here, and can also check out the source code on GitHub.
