How to Setup CI/CD for Flutter Apps with GitHub Actions

The faster you find a bug, the less you pay for it. Sometimes the price is too high, like with Mariner 1 and Therac 25.

What are the benefits of CI for a business?

1. Efficient Developers

By incorporating CI, development team becomes more bankable and the cost of your software projects minimizes. CI aims at refining the integration process, thus breaking it down into simple, daily development tasks, to help minimize the build costs and detect defects early in the software lifecycle.

2. Faster Software Builds

Infrastructure and deployment are automated. Everyone loves to see the output of their work, developers especially, and the business gets to see the benefits of this code right away. Deploying a smaller patch of code is less risky when developers can take advantage of test automation, so they have less overhead and coordination with a QA team.

3. Focus on solving business problems

Dev-ops team must support pipeline development, as it helps developers to focus on solving business problems, without thinking about infrastructure deployment.

Let’s move on to practice.

Practical side

inVerita Flutter developers are experienced in working with such CI systems as Jenkins, Circle IO, Bitrase and Gitlab CI. As we have a Github projects code store, it’s better to integrate CI into Github rather than any other third party service.

Github Actions is a new feature of Github that enables users to create a CI/CD system directly in Github repository. Developers and Dev-ops can write individual tasks, called actions, and combine them to create a custom workflow. It gives us the possibility to build our app, fast test our application and publish them. The best thing is that you can do this inside Github site, avoiding third-party websites.

Github private repositories usually offer a free plan of 2000 build minutes a month. We usually use 1800 build minutes a month for both middle-sized and big projects.

Now, let’s talk about the steps needed for the integration of the CI/CD workflow for a Flutter app.

1) Create Github Project

For example, you have a standard Flutter Counter App.

Integration test (UI tests)

2) Add workflow file

In the root folder of your Flutter project, create a new folder .github and a subfolder workflows. This is where your workflow .yml or .yaml extension files will reside (on example we provide it’s main.yaml)

A project can have multiple workflow files, but for simplicity, we recommend using only one file for this project.

3) Writing Commands

We’ve tried to explain every line of the file with comments. If you need more information about a syntax for Github Actions, check it out here.

Run unit and widgets tests job

We integrated CodeCov to automatically generate beautiful reports from CI.

Here’s how the reports look like:

CI report #1

Build and deploy job

Recommendations on how to improve workflow. We recommend adding personal notifications for developers in messengers like Slack, Telegram or WeChat, as it helps quickly provide some help if needed.

See the workflow and release in Github

Once you have pushed the code you can see the workflow in action by going to repo URL/actions .

The full code is here.

Useful links

Great article about run flutter driver test on github actions

About GitHub Actions doc

Flutter testing

Afterword

We believe that in many cases CI/CD improves code quality and allows receiving first-rate product quicker than other approaches.

When the one should use CI/CD? We recommend using it whenever you start developing from scratch, also for web, mobile and ecommerce projects, different projects with microservice architecture, various front-end and middleware components. In case you have monolithic IT systems and you’d like to integrate CI/CD into the development process, think twice, because you will have to rebuild the architecture according to the new requirements. It is more likely, you won’t benefit from CI when making improvements in your old code, but you will definitely win if you use it for a new project.

If you stuck with your Flutter app development, contact inVerita.