Qfyilyi

Dear stackoverflow community, once more I turn to you :)

I've recently come across the wonder of Gitlab and their very nice bundled CI/CD solution. It works gallantly however, we all need to sign our binaries don't we and I've found no way to upload a key as I would to a Jenkins server for doing this.

So, how can I, without checking in my keys and secrets sign my android (actually flutter) application when building a release?

From what I see, most people define the build job with signing settings referring to a non-committed key.properties file specifying a local keystore.jks. This works fine when building APKs locally but if I would like to build and archive them as a part of the CI/CD job, how do I?

For secret keys, for example the passwords to the keystore itself, I've found that I can simply store them as protected variables but the actual keystore file itself. What can I do about that?

Any ideas, suggestions are dearly welcome.
Cheers

I've used git-secret in the past to check-in password protected secret files. Then pass the password via a secret/protected environmental variable (as you already know) and modify the .gitlab-ci.yml to use the password to open the files and use them.

Usually I store keystore file (as base64 string), alias and passwords to Gitlab's secrets variables.

In the .gitlab-ci.yml do something like:

create_property_files:

  stage: prepare

  only:

    - master

  script:

    - echo $KEYSTORE | base64 -d > my.keystore

    - echo "keystorePath=my.keystore" > signing.properties

    - echo "keystorePassword=$KEYSTORE_PASSWORD" >> signing.properties

    - echo "keyAlias=$ALIAS" >> signing.properties

    - echo "keyPassword=$KEY_PASSWORD" >> signing.properties

  artifacts:

    paths:

      - my.keystore

      - signing.properties

    expire_in: 10 mins

And, finally, in your build gradle:

signingConfigs {

    release {

        file("../signing.properties").with { propFile ->

            if (propFile.canRead()) {

                def properties = new Properties()

                properties.load(new FileInputStream(propFile))



                storeFile file(properties['keystorePath'])

                storePassword properties['keystorePassword']

                keyAlias properties['keyAlias']

                keyPassword properties['keyPassword']

            } else {

                println 'Unable to read signing.properties'

            }

        }

    }

}