My app, auroras.live, has been out in the app stores for about two months now. There’s two versions available, a free and a paid version. Previously I was maintaining three GitHub branches — Master, Free and Paid. I’d make the changes in master, then make a PR to sync free and paid, then edit the config.xml in the respective repos so the app would detect and use the appropriate version.

After a while, this got tedious because I’d have to ensure all three branches were in sync, except for the config.xml file (which got reformatted each time a plugin was added), so I gave up on the idea. Gulp seemed like a great fit for all of this, so I whipped up a quick gulpfile that does a few things for me:

• Sets the app name (e.g. Auroras.live Free or Auroras.live)
• Sets the app ID (e.g. live.auroras.app.free or live.auroras.app)
• Copies the correct icon file, then runs ionic resources to generate the proper icons
• Builds the production version of the app
• Signs the JAR, then runs zipalign.

All I need to do is call gulp build-android-free or gulp build-android-paid and it’s all done. No more manually editing config files, no more copying files around. It’s easy! Want this for your own app? The code is below:

All you need to do is:

• Run npm install --save xmldoc in addition to the other dependencies for Ionic’s default gulpfile
• Edit gulpfile.js and replace the defaults at the top of the file with your own.
• Go into your resources folder and make two icons: icon_free.png and icon_paid.png.
• Call either gulp build-android-free --storepass mykeystorepassword or gulp build-android-paid --storepass mykeystorepassword
• You can also call this script with a few parameters:
  • --packageid – Sets the package ID
  • --packagename – Sets the package name
  • --jarsigner – Path to jarsigner
  • --zipalign – Path to zipalign
  • --keystore – Path to your keystore file
  • --keystorealias – The alias of your keystore