Since I adopted Fabric as a way to monitor vital app stats such as ‘Time in App per User‘ and it’s Beta distribution platform to distribute test builds, increasing APK’s versionCode numbers became a tedious task.
I decided to simplify the things by letting Gradle to do auto versionCode increments when producing release APK’s
Our implementation of build number increments will consist of a property file named version.properties located in the root folder of our project.
The property file will contain 2 variables, one defining the version name such as “2.3” and one defining the version code such as 15
VERSION_NAME=2.3 VERSION_CODE=19 |
In our app module build.gradle file
build.gradle
we will define a function which takes care of retrieving the a bough mentioned values from the properties file and increment the VERSION_CODE if needed.
/** * Get's value from 'version.properties' file * @param varName the name of the variable which value we wan't to get. * @return the variable value. */ def getVersionPropertiesValue(def varName) { def propertiesFile = file('version.properties') if(!propertiesFile.canRead()) { throw new GradleException("Could not read " + propertiesFile.name) } Properties properties = new Properties(); properties.load(new FileInputStream(propertiesFile)) def propertyValue = properties[varName] if(varName == 'VERSION_CODE') { // If we are building release increment the version code List gradleTasksNames = gradle.startParameter.getTaskNames(); for(String taskName : gradleTasksNames) { if(taskName.contains("Release")) { propertyValue = propertyValue.toInteger() + 1 properties[varName] = propertyValue.toString() properties.store(propertiesFile.newWriter(), null) break } } } return propertyValue } |
In the defaultConfig section of the gradle build script we will call this function to retrieve values for the versionName and versionCode of our app.
android { compileSdkVersion 28 defaultConfig { applicationId "com.example.foo" versionCode Integer.valueOf(getVersionPropertiesValue('VERSION_CODE')) versionName getVersionPropertiesValue('VERSION_NAME') minSdkVersion 14 targetSdkVersion 28 } } |
Now each time a release build is made, the version code will increment automatically. If we want to change the version name we can do so by changing the value of VERSION_NAME property.
