Bitrise is a collection of tools and services to help you with the development and automation of your software projects, with a main focus on mobile apps.
Most of this DevCenter describes things related to bitrise.io, the hosted automation service, but the heart of Bitrise is the open source Bitrise CLI / runner, which is responsible for interpreting the build configuration and executing it.
This open source runner is referred to as Bitrise CLI or Bitrise,
and it’s a tool which you can install and run on your own Mac/PC!
This section of the DevCenter is dedicated to this runner (Bitrise CLI) and the
bitrise.yml configuration format, the things described here don’t even require a
bitrise.io account, the only requirement is that
you install the Bitrise CLI on your Mac/PC.
Bitrise CLI - the open source, offline, automation runner ⚓
To run a Bitrise build on your machine, you can install our open source runner
and use the bitrise command to execute your workflows locally.
It’s a great help when you’re developing steps, debugging builds,
or just want to use Bitrise for any kind of automation on your machine.
bitrise.yml - the configuration format ⚓
The configuration format of the Bitrise CLI is referred to as bitrise.yml,
as that’s the expected file name the configuration should be saved with.
Technically the CLI can also accept the configuration in JSON format, and the file name can be changed too, but if you save the configuration into a file named _bitrise.yml_, you can simply _bitrise run_ in that directory, without specifying any configuration path, and the CLI will read the configuration from _bitrise.yml_ automatically.
Step Library (StepLib) ⚓
The StepLib is the collection of the build steps you can use in your
bitrise.yml. The steps in the official Bitrise StepLib
are all open source, you can write your own too and then share it with others!
See the step-template for more information.
You can also create your own Step Library if you want to, but it’s usually easier to just reference your steps with their git clone URL directly if you don’t want to share it with others.
If possible, you should share your steps in the main Bitrise StepLib, to help others as well as for the extra reliability the StepLib offers.
Custom StepLibs can also provide fallbacks (alternative download URLs, caches), automatic and preiodic checks etc. to provide the best reliability, but you get all these for free if you use the main Bitrise StepLib.
Why to use the StepLib and Steps instead of ad-hoc build scripts? ⚓
Same reason why code libraries / dependencies are awesome:
You have a code which can be updated independently from other parts, and you can re-use/share this between your configurations.
Shared maintenance: when you use Steps created by others you don’t have to maintain the codes, but you can contribute to it if you want to, or create and use your own.
Versioned: If a new version doesn’t work for you, you can always go back to a previous one.
We frequently push features as Steps instead of building it into the core tools. This allows faster and versioned iterations, and updating the parts independently. We try to maintain compatibility as much as possible, so older versions can work too, providing a way to upgrade when it’s appropriate for you.