While developing a Gluon Application is easy and fun, building and releasing a native image for every supported platform can be a real time waster.
This is of course where build automation tools come into play. But it can still be hard to find the right build platforms and setup the complete build environment. Those problems now belong to the past thanks to tools like GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions automates your build right from your GitHub repository, but the most interesting part is that it provides ‘runners‘ for all major operating systems. Furthermore it provides a lot of the required development tools and libraries, or at least an easy way to install and configure them.
To make it easier for developers, the Gluon team has created a sample GitHub Action workflow for all Gluon supported platforms. We’re very pleased to announce the inclusion of these workflows in the Gluon Docs. You can find a GitHub Actions section for each platform.
You can see it all at work in the hello-gluon-ci sample, but we’re also very excited about Frank Delporte’s Resistor Calculator app. This application is built on GitHub Actions and made into a native binary for Linux, Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android. Furthermore the iOS and Android builds are automatically uploaded to the App Store and Play Store. Read Frank’s article on FooJay.io to learn more about it and download his app from the stores.
On top of that we’ve also published our first custom GitHub action: Gluon Build License
While this is a very simple action for now, our next step will be to include an even easier Gluon Build action that developers can include in their workflows.
But now it’s time to open your Gluon Application in GitHub (or create a new one at Gluon Start) and add some workflows!