Azure DevOps Android increase versioning during the build

Question

How should I increase my version number in an android project, as a step of build pipeline app center deployment? Does the Azure DevOps has a version manager plugin, or should I create a version.properties file and edit, commit, push into the current branch?

Build pipeline:

Answer 1

Unfortunately is no out of the box support, but you can find here a good tutorial:

• Install Colin's ALM Corner Build & Release Tools that include Version Assemblies task.

• In the Android manifest the name and code should look like this:

  android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0.0"

• Add the “Version Assemblies” task TWICE, once for the version name and once for the version code.

Once added, we will bump the name.

First insert the following (with examples):

• Source Path: src/MobileApps/MyDriving/MyDriving.Android/Properties
• File Pattern: AndroidManifest.xml
• Build Regex Pattern: (?:\d+.\d+.\d+.)(\d+)

Under Advanced:

• Build Regex Group Index: 0
• Regex Replace Pattern: versionName=“\d+.\d+.\d+
• Prefix for Replacements: versionName=”

What this will do is update the version name to the Build number format found under “General”, which mine is set to 1.0.0$(rev:.r)

Now for the next one, which is the version code:

• Source Path: src/MobileApps/MyDriving/MyDriving.Android/Properties
• File Pattern: AndroidManifest.xml
• Build Regex Pattern: (?:\d+.\d+.\d+.)(\d+)

Under Advanced:

• Build Regex Group Index: 1
• Regex Replace Pattern: versionCode=“\d+
• Prefix for Replacements: versionCode\

And just like that you are good to go. This will simply update it with the current version revision :)

Answer 2

There is an existing task called Mobile App Tasks for iOS and Android in the marketplace which was developed by James Montemagno

You can find the step-by-step instruction in the github

He has developed this task mainly to address this kind of versioning in both android/IOS Apps.

Answer 3

The best solution for me was make a version.properties file to track versioning and then modify it during the pipeline build process (shell script). The others are bad especially for custom versioning.

Answer 4

This can be done more clean with out using the properties file and then replacing that using a shell script.

In the top level build.gradle file, under the build scripts:

buildscript {

    def getVersionCode = { ->
        def code = project.hasProperty('versionCode') ? versionCode.toInteger() : -1
        println "VersionCode is set to $code"
        return code
    }

    
    def getVersionName = { ->
        def name = project.hasProperty('versionName') ? versionName : "1.0"
        println "VersionName is set to $name"
        return name
    } 

    ext{
        versionCode = getVersionCode()
        versionName = getVersionName()
    }
}

In your module specific gradle file :

defaultConfig {
        versionCode rootProject.ext.versionCode
        versionName rootProject.ext.versionName
}

In your Devops pipeline for the gradle build task, just pass on the options like so:

-PversionName=$(Build.BuildNumber) -PversionCode=$(Build.BuildId)