Question about nightly builds

[vanous]

I do not want to use an existing issue or pr...#952 , so let me please ask here:

I've got the build to run on my little vserver and setup a cronjob for 1 a.m. to check for new commits and build a new nightly apk. Let's see if it is working. In case someone has already installed the first test nightly from my repo, you need to uninstall it first. I had to change the signing key.

Repo (still beta): https://fdroid.storchp.de/fdroid/repo/

@pstorch this is awesome. I am looking for inspiration on how to do a nightly release for Gadgetbridge. I do the build already, but am looking for an inspiration on how to do the actual repo, as a static page via CI/CD. Do you use f-droid, or repomaker periodically? Or can repomaker be used just to create the scaffolding and then simply update the xml? Thank you very much!

[pstorch]

@vanous I basically followed the instructions from here https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Setup_an_F-Droid_App_Repo/ and here https://android.izzysoft.de/articles/named/fdroid-simple-binary-repo?lang=en to install fdroid on the VM.

For each app I've created a new fdroid metadata.yml file with the nightly app id.

Then I've setup a cronjob which builds and signs the APK and copies it to the fdroid/repo dir, I also copy the fastlane metadata from the git working dir to the fdroid metadata/app-id/ directory (excluding the title.txt file, which I've created manually).
I also create a changelog file with the last 5 commit messages. The commit count git rev-list HEAD --count on the main branch is used as the version code. Ideas from @dennisguse.

Finally I run fdroid update and publish the fdroid/repo dir via a simple webserver.

[pstorch]

Ah, one app had a missing changelog entry in the metadata. Now it works. But I think linking to the release pages is not appropriate for the nightlies. I should link to the last commits in the source repo. Even better to the last commit used to build the nightly.

[vanous]

You need to fill changelog into the config for each app, so it becomes part of the index-v1.json

https://codeberg.org/vanous/Gadgetbridge/src/branch/nightly-branch/repoconfig/metadata/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadgetbridge.nightly_nopebble.yml#L11

[pstorch]

Instead of the link to the releases page, I've added the content of the "whatsNew" tag (which is the changelog I created for this nightly).
Thanks again @vanous, a basic webpage was a missing piece of mine.

[vanous]

Cool idea, i will do the same 👍

[vanous]

Few updates for anyone interested.

• thank you so much for the inspiration :) it is off-topic here, but i hope this can help to some interested people
• all our setup is not fully isolated in https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/fdroid-repo-config and documented as much as i could, this could help if anyone is looking into the same thing (on Codeberg but also elsewhere), so 100% of our publishing pipeline is out in the open. Tokens and keys are in CI secrets.
• i tested adding the "repo listing" directly into fdroidserver, it worked but i decided not to use it and not to push this upstream as a PR because some data were actually not available during the build. I already forgot what exactly was missing as this was few weeks back :)
• i tested using the Releases endpoints as apk sources (one must edit the index and re-sign it) but unfortunately f-droid does not and will not support this. I left the scripts in my setup repo for the record
• for the same above reasons, i stopped doing apk releases via the Releases endpoint. Also, as i now use another git repository for hosting of the pages content, the release tag was actually not relevant in that repo at all. Scripts also left in place.