Problem

One codebase. Multiple Google Play Store submissions with different icons, XML resources, build configurations, etc.

Solution

$ flavours install
$ flavours create

About

Flavours is a command-line run ruby gem that reads from a .json file to create new Product Flavors and adds them to your Android application's build.gradle file to make creating new apps a breeze. It allows you to have one code-base that can create a multitude of apps without very much involvement from you, the developer.

TL;DR: You can whitelabel Android apps extremely easily now.

Requirements

Flavours requires your Android application use the Gradle build system.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Set Up
• Formatting flavours.json
• Creating Flavors
• The Future
• Contributing

Installation

flavours is officially hosted on RubyGems, so installation is a breeze:

$ gem install flavours

Set Up

Run flavours install in your app's main directory. This will create a file, flavours.json, where the configurations will be used to build out from here. You are almost ready to start creating new apps!

Formatting flavours.json

Here's a basic gist of how to format your flavours.json file:

{
    "flavours": [
        {
            "flavourName": "YourFlavor",
            "packageName": "somePackageName",
            "buildConfig": {
                "API_KEY": "someApiKey"
            },
            "iconUrl": "https://someurl.com/image.png",
            "colorsXML": {
                "primaryColor": "#E51919"
            },
            "stringsXML": {
                "someString": "someValue"
            }
        },
        {
            "flavourName": "YourFlavor2",
            "packageName": "somePackageName2",
            "buildConfig": {
                "API_KEY": "someApiKey"
            },
            "iconUrl": "https://someurl.com/image.png",
            "colorsXML": {
                "primaryColor": "#E51919"
            },
            "stringsXML": {
                "someString": "someValue"
            }
        }
    ]
}

In the top-level of the JSON file, we have the main key/value pair:

• flavours

This section contains an array of key/value pairs that correspond to each product flavor you'd like to create. Here are all of the possiblities:

• flavourName
• iconURL or iconPath
• packageName
• buildConfig
• colorsXML
• stringsXML
• settingsXML
• drawables

flavourName is required to build that Product Flavor. However, the other options are all optional. [buildConfig, colorsXML, stringsXML] all house more key/values that will be be turned in to XML, or String properties in the BuildConfig.java file specific to that Flavor.

settingsXML has a slightly different format. It's an array of objects with key/value pairs:

"settingsXML": [
    {
        "type": "drawable",
        "name": "someDrawable",
        "value": "@drawable/someDrawable"
    }
]

This results in a settings.xml file where the lines look like this:

<item name="NAME" type="TYPE">VALUE</item>

drawables also has a slightly different format. It's an array of objects with key/value pairs like settingsXML is, but the pairs are slightly different.

"drawables": [
    {
        "name": "some_image.png",
        "path": "path/relative/to/project/an_image.png"
    }
]

What this does is finds an image relative to your directory at the specified path key/value and then makes a copy of it to the appropriate {flavour}/res/drawable folder. It doesn't permanently move your file, just duplicates it in the correct spot. It puts it in a general drawable folder instead of one like drawable-hdpi.

Creating Flavors

Now that you're set up - it's time to run this bad boy! Make sure that you have updated your flavours.json file with the correct information for your apps, and then run the following command inside the project directory.

flavours create -m NameOfMainAppModule

What this does is goes to your flavours.json file and looks for your various flavors and attempts to add them to your build.gradle file in that specific module's folder. It will also go to the interwebs and download the file in the iconURL parameter if it's present and then chop it up into the different sizes your app needs.

Other Options

• -d, --directory - if not in the current directory, specify a new path
• -u, --url - the url of a flavours formatted JSON file

flavours create -m NameOfMainAppModule -d ~/Path/To/App -u http://someurl.com/flavours.json

Global Options

--dontlog will not log the status/operations to the console.

--help will fill you in on what you need to do for an action.

The Future

• Unit Tests
• Google Play Store deployment of Apps

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request