Intro to Fastlane for iOS - the How

Mar 10 2025

Introduction

In our last post we spoke about why we should go with Fastlane for iOS. In this post, we will talk about how to get started with Fastlane. I think it’s important to note that Fastlane is a great tool for you to use, regardless of if you’re using it for a big company project or a small indie app. It’s a great tool to have in your belt.

Pre-requisites

There are a few things that you need to have before you can start. Firstly, we need to make sure we’ve got Ruby installed on our machine. This isn’t a very difficult thing to do, and the way recommended by Fastlane in their docs is rbenv.

Secondly, you need, of course, the Xcode toolchain installed. If you’ve got Xcode installed, you’re good to go. If you don’t, then you’re reading the wrong blog post.

And last but not least, is to actually install Fastlane itself. You can install it with Homebrew, but that means it’s installed on your machine, so if you want it to run on some sort of a CI (Foreshadowing!?) you might want to install it with Bundler.

Installation

Installing Fastlane with Bundler is as easy as running gem install bundler, followed by bundle init in your project directory, and then adding gem 'fastlane' to your Gemfile. After that, you can run bundle install and you’re good to go.

When you finish, your Gemfile should look something like this:

# frozen_string_literal: true

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "fastlane"

Getting started

Now that you’ve got Fastlane installed, you can run bundle exec fastlane init in your project directory. This will create a fastlane directory in your project, with a Fastfile in it. This is where you will write your Fastlane lanes. The prefix bundle exec is important, as it makes sure that you’re running the Fastlane version that you’ve installed with Bundler.

When prompted by Fastlane to choose what usage you need, select 4, as we’re going to customize our Fastlane lanes, and do our setup manually.

Conclusion

And that’s it! You’ve now got Fastlane installed on your machine, and you’ve got a Fastfile in your project. This was a bit of a shorter post, but I think it’s important to get the basics out of the way before we dive into the more complex stuff. You can read more about the setup on Fastlane’s docs. In the next post, we’re going to talk about how to write your first Fastlane lane, and what you can do with it. Stay tuned! 🚀