app-tester

app-tester

App tester is an app built with all plugins known to vigour which presents the user with an input box allowing him to be redirected wherever. It's intended use is to help with app development.

Installation

via hockeyapp

• Android app-tester
• iOS app-tester

Usage

• Install the app on your device
• Enter a URL (starting with http(s)://) in the input box
• Tap the button
• Get redirected to that URL
• The app downloaded from that URL can expect the latest versions of all vigour plugins to be available.

Debugging

Debugging requires the device to be plugged into your computer. Simulators and emulators should also work the same way.

Android

• Open Google Chrome
• Navigate to chrome://inspect
• The page opened in app-tester should be listed here, click on it to open it in the dev tools
• To get the device (native) logs, use the Android Debugging Bridge (adb): adb logcat (more info)

iOS

• Open Safari
• In the develop menu, find the device running the app-tester. In that submenu, you should find the page currently loaded.
• Click on it to open it in the Safari dev tools
• TODO find out how to get access to device (native) logs

Maintenance

When the native code for a plugin changes, a new version of the app-tester has to be built and published to hockeyapp.

Building

Building is as easy as npm run android or npm run ios. Of course you will need to have the tools for these platforms installed:

Android

• Android SDKs
• Android debugging bridge (adb)
• The ANDROID_HOME environment variable must point to the location of the Android SDK installation. In my case, I have:

$ echo $ANDROID_HOME
/Users/shawn/android-sdks/

iOS

• Xcode
• Xcode command line tools

Publishing to hockeyapp

To publish an app to hockey, you will of course need the credentials to the hockey account, which you can find here

Android

Building for Android creates a .apk file. Simply upload this file to hockeyapp to allow others to install it.

iOS

Building for iOS creates an xcode project and workspace. If you open the workspace in xcode, you can then archive the project and export it as a .ipa file which can be uploaded to hockey. The archiving and exporting parts require that you have some certificates and provisioning profiles in your keychain. Make sure you make a development build, otherwise the app-tester will lose it's debugging capabilities.