flutter_distribute_manager 2.0.0

Ship Flutter apps to QA in one command. Builds Android APK and iOS IPA, then uploads to Google Drive (via rclone) and Diawi with shareable install links. CI/CD ready.

Changelog

2.0.0

A full audit of the build, distribution and runtime layers. Several defects here meant the tool shipped the wrong artifact, or hung, rather than failing — the worst kind of bug for a release tool. Test suite grew from 100 to 361.

Why this is a major release. The behavioural changes are not backwards compatible, even though almost all of them are corrections:

• The tool now refuses to ship artifacts it previously shipped. Stale IPAs left by a failed export, and debug APKs sitting in flutter-apk/, were being uploaded to QA; both are now rejected. A pipeline that (unknowingly) depended on one of those files being produced will now fail instead.
• --export-method release-testing was the default and was never a value Flutter accepts, so every iOS build without a Team ID failed at the usage check. The default now works, which means iOS builds that used to fail immediately will now actually run.
• Exit codes are more specific: a missing binary or bad --flutter-path is now 78 rather than 255, "built but no artifact found" is 70 rather than 1, and --version in a non-global position no longer exits 0.
• A filesystem error while taking the build lock no longer reports "another build is already running" (exit 69); it warns and builds unlocked.
• rclone is now invoked with --retries 1, since its own retries were multiplying with the tool's retry policy for up to nine full uploads.
• ProcessRunner.capture/stream and DriveUploader gained members; anything implementing those interfaces must be updated.

Shipped the wrong artifact

• iOS: a stale IPA could be uploaded to QA. flutter build ipa exits 0 when the archive succeeds but xcodebuild -exportArchive fails, and it never cleans build/ios/ipa/. After a signing failure the tool picked up a previous IPA, stamped it with the current timestamp and shipped it. Builds now record a start time and reject anything older; export failure is detected in Flutter's output.
• Android: debug APKs were shipped alongside release ones. The Flutter Gradle plugin copies every variant into one flat flutter-apk/ directory and never deletes anything, so any developer who had run flutter run had an app-debug.apk sitting there. Artifact discovery is now variant- and flavor-aware, and rejects stale files.
• --flavor was passed to the build but ignored when locating artifacts, so a multi-flavor project could ship the wrong flavor.
• Release builds silently signed with the debug keystore — the Flutter template's default — now warned about before the build starts.

iOS builds that could never succeed

• --export-method release-testing is not a value Flutter accepts (app-store, ad-hoc, development, enterprise), and it was the default. Every iOS build without a Team ID failed with a usage error.
• Hardcoded signingStyle: automatic broke every manual-signing project.
• ExportOptions.plist: XML is now escaped, destination is set, App Store exports set uploadSymbols and manageAppVersionAndBuildNumber: false, and the obsolete compileBitcode key is gone. enterprise was missing from the export-method model entirely.
• Xcode presence was checked with which xcodebuild, which succeeds with Command Line Tools only; the build then died minutes later.

Hangs

• The child process's stdin was never closed, so anything that reads it — sudo, CocoaPods, a Gradle prompt, an SDK licence question — hung forever with no timeout.
• A daemon inheriting the pipe blocked the run after a successful build. Gradle and adb keep stdout open, so waiting for end-of-stream meant waiting for the daemon to exit. Now a bounded post-exit drain.
• A single non-UTF-8 byte killed the CLI mid-build with an unhandled FormatException and exit 255 — a café in a path was enough. Decoding is now lenient.

Distribution

• The Diawi API token leaked into logs and stack traces (the poll URI carries it, and ClientException.toString() includes the URI). Redacted. The notification webhook URL leaked the same way.
• Discord notifications always failed — the payload used Slack's text field; Discord requires content. Slack, Discord and Teams are now detected and formatted per dialect.
• A 401 or 413 re-uploaded the whole IPA three times. 4xx is no longer retried (except 408/425/429), and Retry-After is honoured. rclone's own --retries 3 multiplied with the retry policy for up to 9 full uploads; now pinned to 1.
• The Drive progress bar never worked and destroyed error messages. It required a Transferred: prefix that --stats-one-line does not emit, so every progress line fell into the 20-line error tail and evicted the real error within ten seconds.
• No HTTP timeouts on Diawi — a stalled connection hung the CLI after the build. Poll bound raised from 3 minutes, and a timeout now names the job id instead of stranding an uploaded build.
• A failed rclone link was silent; QA got a summary with no link and no reason. Added DriveUploader.preflight() to validate the remote and its token before a build is paid for.

Runtime and config

• A filesystem error was reported as "another build is already running", which no amount of waiting fixes. Lock paths are now canonicalized, so -d app and -d app/ no longer take separate locks on one project.
• One unknown config field discarded the entire config, silently losing the saved Diawi token and rclone remote.
• ProjectConfig.save() crashed a finished run on a read-only checkout, after the uploads, so the user never saw their links.
• Trailing YAML comments were parsed into the app name and version, landing in artifact filenames and Drive paths.
• The project is now found by walking up from a subdirectory.
• --version anywhere in the arguments exited 0, so a CI step with a mistyped flag passed silently.
• The saved Diawi token was echoed to the terminal by config and init; the config file is now chmod 600.
• FVM detection understood only the .fvm/flutter_sdk layout.

1.1.1

Bug fixes from an adversarial review of 1.1.0. No API or flag changes.

• Build lock moved out of build/ — it lived in build/.fdm.lock, which flutter clean deletes, allowing a second concurrent build to slip in. The lock now lives in a stable OS-temp path keyed by the project, survives a clean, and no longer unlinks on release (closing an unlink race) or NUL-pads its pid stamp.
• flutter clean failures are now surfaced instead of being swallowed (the auto-retry path no longer silently rebuilds against a dirty cache).
• More accurate exit codes — "no artifacts" and artifact-staging I/O failures report build (70); invalid --retry reports usage (64).
• fvm version reporting now resolves from the project directory, and a warning is shown when an fvm-pinned project falls back to a global Flutter.
• gradleDeclaresAbiFilters no longer false-positives on abiFilters inside block/inline comments.
• Build-failure signing hint no longer fires on benign debug-keystore log lines.
• Bundled global flags (e.g. -vq doctor) are now routed correctly instead of being treated as a positional to build.

1.1.0

Real-world hardening from testing on a large, fvm-pinned production app. All existing flags remain backward-compatible.

Added

• fvm support — the tool now detects fvm-pinned projects (.fvmrc, .fvm/, .fvm/fvm_config.json) and invokes the project's pinned Flutter via fvm flutter …, so version-pinned apps build correctly with no manual PATH export. New --flutter-path overrides the executable explicitly.
• --clean — run flutter clean before building. The tool also auto-cleans and retries once when it detects a corrupted Kotlin cache.
• Concurrent-build lock — a per-project OS lock (build/.fdm.lock) refuses a second simultaneous build, preventing Gradle/Kotlin cache corruption.
• --flavor — passed through to flutter build.
• --quiet / -q — silence non-essential output (build chatter, detail lines); errors, warnings and the summary still show.
• Distinct exit codes for CI: build failure (70), upload failure (69), missing configuration (78).

Improved

• --split-per-abi ↔ ndk.abiFilters conflict — when an app declares abiFilters, the tool builds a single APK by default (with a notice) instead of failing after a multi-minute build. An explicit --split-per-abi / --no-split-per-abi still wins.
• Actionable failure hints — known Gradle/Kotlin/signing/SDK/v1-embedding failures now print a one-line fix instead of just raw output.
• doctor — fvm-aware Flutter check (green when resolvable via fvm), verifies the configured rclone remote exists, and reports resolved Flutter/Java versions.
• init — empty Diawi-token / webhook answers now skip with a clear notice.
• Pre-build summary shows the resolved Flutter toolchain (and fvm), plus a reminder that --environment only labels artifacts and sets --dart-define=ENV=….

1.0.1

Documentation and metadata polish (no functional changes).

• Reworked README and example walkthrough for clarity.
• Tightened the package description.
• Updated LICENSE copyright holder.

1.0.0

Initial release.

Build & distribute

• build (default command): build release Android APK (--split-per-abi) and iOS IPA for one or both platforms.
• Environment tagging (DEV / UAT / PROD) with timestamped artifact names, also passed to the build as --dart-define=ENV=….
• Google Drive uploads via rclone with an automatic App/Year/Month/Environment folder structure and case-insensitive folder matching to avoid duplicates.
• Diawi integration for iOS one-tap install links.

Professional touches

• Resilient uploads — Drive and Diawi transfers retry with exponential backoff (--retry).
• Live progress bar — rclone transfers render as a branded [████░░░] 64% 42 MiB / 66 MiB 4.2 MiB/s ETA 6s meter.
• Per-step timing — build/upload durations reported in the summary.
• --json — machine-readable result on stdout for CI pipelines.
• --dry-run — preview the full plan without building or uploading.
• Team notifications — post a build summary to a Slack/Discord/generic webhook (--notify-url).
• Box-drawing UI and a summary table for a polished terminal experience.

Setup & diagnostics

• init: one-time setup wizard (install rclone, authenticate Drive, save Diawi token and notification webhook).
• doctor: environment & connectivity health checks, including a macOS Gatekeeper section that lists quarantined binaries and the exact xattr command to clear them.
• config: interactive configuration editor with full reset.

Everything else

• Interactive prompts plus a fully non-interactive mode (--yes) for CI/CD.
• Per-machine and per-project configuration files.
• A reusable library API (package:flutter_distribute_manager/…).