Frontend
The frontend of this project is a Flutter application designed to run on both Android and iOS devices (and possibly as a PWA). The frontend is responsible for displaying the user interface and handling user input. It communicates with the backend via a REST-api to retrieve and send data.
Getting Started
The flutter application is divided into multiple chunks of code.
- the
libdirectory contains the main code of the application. - the
androidandiosdirectories contain platform-specific code. - the root directory contains configuration files and metadata.
To run the application, you need to have the Flutter SDK installed. You can find instructions on how to do this here.
Once you have the Flutter SDK installed, you can locally install the dependencies by running:
flutter pub get
Development
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Icons and logos
The application uses a custom launcher icon and splash screen. These are managed platform-independently using the flutter_launcher_icons package.
To update the icons, change the flutter_launcher_icons.yaml configuration file. Especially the image_path is relevant. Then run
dart run flutter_launcher_icons
Deploying a new version
To truly deploy a new version of the application, i.e. to the official app stores, a special CI step is required. This listens for new tags. To create a new tag position yourself on the main branch and run
git tag -a v<name> -m "Release <name>"
git push origin v<name>
We adhere to the Semantic Versioning standard, so the tag should be of the form v0.1.8 for example.
Fastlane - in depth
The application is deployed to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store using fastlane: https://docs.fastlane.tools/
Fastlane is installed as a Ruby gem. Since the bundler-gemfile is scoped to a single directory, a Gemfile is included in both the android and ios directories. Once installed, the usage is
cd frontend/android # or ios
bundle install
bundle exec fastlane <lane>
This is reused in the CI/CD pipeline to automate the deployment process.
Secrets used by fastlane are stored on hashicorp vault and are fetched by the CI/CD pipeline. See below.
Secrets
These are mostly used by the CI/CD pipeline to deploy the application. The main usage for github actions is documented under https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-action.
Platform-specific secrets are used by the CI/CD pipeline to deploy to the respective app stores.
GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEYis used to authenticate with the Google Maps API and is scoped to the android platformANDROID_KEYSTOREis used to sign the android apkANDROID_GOOGLE_KEYis used to authenticate with the Google Play Store apiIOS_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEYis used to authenticate with the Google Maps API and is scoped to the ios platformIOS_GOOGLE_...IOS_GOOGLE_...IOS_GOOGLE_...