Create a Patch

Once you have published a release of your app, you can push updates using one of the shorebird patch commands.

Android

shorebird patch android

iOS

shorebird patch ios

macOS (beta)

shorebird patch macos

This will do several things:

1. Builds the artifacts for the update.
2. Downloads the corresponding release artifacts.
3. Generates a patch using the diff between the release and the current changes.
4. Uploads the patch artifacts to the Shorebird backend
5. Promotes the patch to the stable channel.

Example output:

$ shorebird patch android
✓ Building patch (3.0s)
✓ Fetching apps (0.2s)
✓ Detecting release version (0.3s)
✓ Fetching release (77ms)
✓ Fetching Flutter revision (15ms)
✓ Fetching release artifacts (0.3s)
✓ Downloading release artifacts (1.9s)
✓ Creating artifacts (4.1s)

🚀 Ready to publish a new patch!

📱 App: My App (61fc9c16)
📦 Release Version: 0.1.0+1
📺 Channel: stable
🕹️  Platform: android [arm64 (166.20 KB), arm32 (161.78 KB), x86_64 (161.51 KB)]

Would you like to continue? (y/N) Yes
✓ Creating patch (93ms)
✓ Uploading artifacts (1.5s)
✓ Fetching channels (86ms)
✓ Promoting patch to stable (78ms)

✅ Published Patch!

By default, this uses the release version that the app is currently on. If you want to patch a different release version, you can use the --release-version option. For example:

shorebird patch android --release-version 0.1.0+1

If your application supports flavors or multiple release targets, you can specify the flavor and target using the --flavor and --target options:

shorebird patch [android|ios] --target lib/main_development.dart --flavor development

Note

shorebird patch wraps flutter build and can take any argument flutter build can. To pass arguments to the underlying flutter build you need to put flutter build arguments after a -- separator. For example: shorebird patch android -- --dart-define="foo=bar" will define the "foo" environment variable inside Dart as you might have done with flutter build directly.

Patch Performance

Android

Patching an application on Android has no effect on performance.

iOS and macOS

Patching an application on iOS and macOS typically does not affect an application performance. However the patching mechanism on iOS and macOS is different from Android. Unchanged code runs as normal (on the CPU), changed (or added) code will run in a Dart interpreter (slower than the CPU). Typically this change is undetectable, but if you are changing particularly performance-sensitive Dart code (e.g. code for processing images, or large data) you may see a performance difference after patching.

You can always test your patches before sending them to users using by staging patches.

If you ever see unexpected performance changes when patching, please contact us we would love to help!