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Shorebird

CI Integration

Building with Shorebird in CI should be a very small change from your existing Flutter CI builds. Changes required:

  1. Installing Shorebird on the builder.
  2. Getting Shorebird credentials onto the builder.
  3. Replacing flutter build --release with shorebird release or shorebird patch.

We have detailed instructions for integrating into

However if you do not use these providers, we’ve also provided generic instructions below:

Installing Shorebird

Installing Shorebird is identical to how you install it locally. Most builders use Linux or Mac, which means running:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shorebirdtech/install/main/install.sh -sSf | bash

for more details, see Getting Started.

Getting Shorebird credentials onto the builder

Shorebird cloud requires authentication to be able to publish releases to your account. Doing so is two parts. One is getting the CI token from shorebird installed on your local machine. The second is installing that token on the builder.

Now that you have a token, it is important to keep that token secure. We recommend using a secrets manager for the token, or secure environment variables, depending on your CI setup. shorebird commands will look for the token to be in a SHOREBIRD_TOKEN environment variable.

Replacing flutter build --release with shorebird.

Releasing

If you’re already building with Flutter in CI, you should see a line similar to flutter build aab or flutter build ipa in your CI config.

To move to Shorebird, you need only replace the flutter build line with shorebird release. For example:

flutter build ipa --dart-define=HERO=Mario

Would become:

shorebird release ios --dart-define=HERO=Mario

shorebird release supports almost all of the same arguments that flutter build does. If you ever see an error with shorebird release not supporting an argument that flutter build does, you can use -- to tell shorebird to pass any argument after -- down to flutter build separately, e.g.

flutter build ipa --dart-define=HERO=Mario --enable-impeller

Would become:

shorebird release ios --dart-define=HERO=Mario -- --enable-impeller

shorebird can support building with different versions of Flutter. By default shorebird will use whatever the most recent Flutter stable is, which can change. If you’d like to pin your CI to a specific Flutter version you can do this by adding --flutter-version to your command, e.g.

shorebird release ios --flutter-version=3.22.1 --dart-define=HERO=Mario -- --enable-impeller

Patching

Patching is identical to releasing, just use shorebird patch instead of shorebird release.

Patches with Shorebird can only ever apply to an existing Release. By definition a patch is a set of changes to apply to a Release.

shorebird patch does not take a --flutter-version argument, instead takes a --release-version argument, to specify which release version of your app you’re trying to patch. shorebird will look up the exact version of Flutter used to build the release and use that exact version to build the patch.

Thank you for reading this guide! If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to us at our Discord.