microsoft/google-play-vsts-extension

microsoft/google-play-vsts-extension

Description: Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) extension for performing continuous delivery to the Google Play store from your automated CI builds

Language: TypeScript

License: NOASSERTION

Stars: 95

Forks: 55

Open issues: 61

Created: 2016-01-28T17:07:59Z

Pushed: 2026-06-10T07:32:44Z

Default branch: master

Fork: no

Archived: no

README:

Visual Studio Team Services Extension for Google Play

Provides build/release tasks that enable performing continuous delivery to the Google Play store from an automated VSTS build or release definition

Install now!

Visual Studio Team Services Extension for Google Play


This extension contains a set of deployment tasks which allow you to automate the release, promotion and rollout of app updates to the Google Play store from your CI environment. This can reduce the effort needed to keep your internal test, alpha, beta, rollout and production deployments up-to-date, since you can simply push changes to the configured source control branches, and let your automated build take care of the rest.

Prerequisites

This extension supports Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2017 and later.

In order to automate the release of app updates to the Google Play store, you need to have manually released at least one version through the Google Play Developer Console. Additionally, you need to create a service account that is authorized to manage your app(s) releases on your behalf and can be used to authenticate "headlessly" from your VSTS build/release definitions. If you haven't already done so, then perform the following steps to create a service account: > For a more in depth guide click this link.

1. Login to the Google Play Developer Console and select Setup in the left-hand navigation menu (the gear icon)

2. Select the API access setting and click the Create Service Account button underneath the Service Accounts section

3. Follow the provided Google Developers Console hyperlink

4. Click the Create credentials button in the displayed modal dialog, and select Service account key (with the role "Owner")

5. Select JSON as the Key type and click the Create button

6. Save the provided JSON file somewhere safe and memorable. You'll be using it later.

7. Back in the Google Play Developer Console, click the Done button to close the modal

8. Click the Grant access button in the row associated with the service account you just created.

9. Ensure that the Role is set to Release Manager and then click the Add user button

To take advantage of the metadata updating capabilities, files need to be organized using fastlane’s supply tool format:

1. Install the supply tool

sudo gem install supply

2. Navigate to your root folder

cd [your_project_folder]

3. Download metadata for an existing app to the project folder

supply init

Quick Start

Once you have created or retrieved credentials for you Google Play service account, then perform the following steps to automate releasing updates from a VSTS build or release definition:

1. Install the Google Play extension from the VSTS Marketplace

2. Go to your Visual Studio Team Services or TFS project, click on the Build tab, and create a new build definition (the "+" icon) that is hooked up to your project's appropriate source repo

3. Click Add build step... and select the neccessary tasks to generate your release assets (e.g. Gulp, Cordova Build)

4. Click Add build step... and select Google Play - Release from the Deploy category

5. Configure the Google Play - Release task with the JSON private key file created above, the generated APK file, and the desired release track.

6. Click the Queue Build button or push a change to your configured repo in order to run the newly defined build pipeline

7. Your app changes will now be automatically published to the Google Play store!

Configuring Your Google Play Publisher Credentials

In addition to specifying your publisher credentials file directly within each build task, you can also configure your credentials globally and refer to them within each build or release definition as needed. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. Setup a publishing manager (https://play.google.com/apps/publish/) and get the JSON key file from the Google Developer API console

2. Go into your Visual Studio Team Services or TFS project and click on the gear icon in the lower left corner

3. Click on the Service Connections tab

4. Click on New service connection and select Google Play

5. Give the new endpoint a name and enter the credentials for the publishing manager you generated in step#1. The credentials you need can be found in the JSON file and are the Email and the private key.

6. Select this endpoint via the name you chose in #5 whenever you add either the Google Play - Release or Google Play - Promote tasks to a build or release definition

Task Reference

In addition to the custom service endpoint, this extension also contributes the following three build and release tasks:

• [Google Play - Release](#google-play---release) - Allows automating the release of a new Android app version to the Google Play store.

• [Google Play - Promote](#google-play---promote) - Allows automating the promotion of a previously released Android app update from one track to another (e.g. alpha -> beta).

• [Google Play - Increase Rollout](#google-play---increase-rollout) - Allows automating increasing the rollout percentage of a previous release app update.

• [Google Play - Release Bundle](#google-play---release-bundle) - Allows automating the release of a new Android bundle to the Google Play store.

• [Google Play - Status Update](#google-play---status-update) - Allows you to update the status of an app that was…